Skip to main content

Clare Pooley

Biography

Clare Pooley

Clare Pooley graduated from Cambridge University, and then spent 20 years in the heady world of advertising before becoming a full-time writer. Her debut novel, THE AUTHENTICITY PROJECT, was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 29 languages. She is also the author of the novels IONA IVERSON'S RULES FOR COMMUTING and HOW TO AGE DISGRACEFULLY. Pooley lives in Fulham, London, with her husband, three children and two border terriers.

Clare Pooley

Books by Clare Pooley

How to Age Disgracefully
by Clare Pooley - Fiction, Humor, Women's Fiction

When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards. The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac; to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades; to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign. But when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide. When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their tiny friends in the daycare next door --- as well as the teenage father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog --- to save the building.

Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting
by Clare Pooley - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Every day, Iona, a larger-than-life magazine advice columnist, travels the 10 stops from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station by train, accompanied by her dog, Lulu. She sees the same people, whom she knows only by nickname. Of course, they never speak. Seasoned commuters never do. Then one morning, the man she calls Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape right in front of her. He’d have died were it not for the timely intervention of Sanjay, a nurse, who gives him the Heimlich maneuver. This single event starts a chain reaction, and an eclectic group of people with almost nothing in common except their commute discover that a chance encounter can blossom into much more.

The Authenticity Project
by Clare Pooley - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian, believes that most people aren't really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes --- in a plain, green journal --- the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It's run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves --- and soon find each other In Real Life at Monica's Café.