The Authenticity Project

The Authenticity Project: A Novel by Clare Pooley (Viking, 2020)

This novel has been on lots of best books lists lately so I put it on hold at the library. It’s basically another book about young adults living in present day London looking for romantic partners, but with the addition of an elderly man who is the reason the young adults meet. He leaves a notebook (labelled The Authenticity Project, although he turns out to be lying) in a bookstore which gets passed on to various people. I watched a movie with a similar (but not identical) plot on Netflix earlier this year.

There are a ton of British cultural references (and frankly ordinary nouns too) most of which I didn’t get. For example I had to Google what the “Eurostar” is – apparently a train you can take from London to Paris, presumably through the Channel Tunnel though their website didn’t say so. Overall it was a good story but I was rather disappointed in the way it ended. I would have resolved each of the characters’ stories differently. Oh well, it’s Pooley’s novel. It was nice that she thanked everyone on the book production team by name in the Acknowledgements at the end.