The People on Platform 5: A feel-good and uplifting read with unforgettable characters from the bestselling author of The Authenticity Project

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Filled with delightful characters... this heart-warming book explores relationships and the dilemmas of everyday life * Candis * This was such a heartfelt novel. I loved the idea of all these different strangers and their lives/plotlines merging together because of a commute. The story centers around Iona (the glue that holds this train gang together), but we also get to meet so many other characters that bring laughter, sadness, a few surprises, and hope to the story. I was not expecting there to be so many POV's, but they all meshed together to create this wonderfully quirky and hodgepodge quilt of human experience. Not every plotline is wrapped up in a bow, but they're left in a satisfying and hopeful place. The book was magnificently narrated by Clare Corbett and I was so impressed by her ability to voice such a variety of characters regardless of age. Truly a wonderful novel and listen!

If you are an inveterate reader, the odds are good, better than good actually, that fellow readers or close friends (sometimes, happily, they are both) that at some point they will recommend a book to you. A book, they will assure you with a mix of solemnity and enthusiasm, is Continue ReadingNever give up a seat once occupied unless (a) it's for a pregnant lady (b) it's for someone old or infirm (c) Iona tells you to The key character of the group who brings Piers (known as Smart-But-Sexist-Surbiton) and others together including Sanjay (Too-Good-To-be-True New Malden), Emmie, Martha, Jake and David together is Iona (Piers christens her Crazy Dog Woman before he really gets to know her), a onetime IT girl of the Eighties and Nineties who, with the love of her life Bea, is a flamboyantly extrovert lesbian who works as a magazine therapist and a woman with a take-no-prisoners approach to bringing people together. Another totally original, thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying book from Clare Pooley. Full of original characters and wisdom, I absolutely loved it." - Katie Fforde It leaves] the reader with that fuzzy feeling you want from a feel-good book. Fans of her previous hit, The Authenticity Project, will not be disappointed * Woman's Weekly *

A magnificent, heart-warming novel celebrating the power of human connection - it's an absolute joy Freya Sampson, author of The Last Library courtesy IMP Awards) Creative inspiration can come from all kinds of strange, beautiful and unexpected places – a waterfall at sunset, a colourfully-dressed woman on a train at peak hour or a snippet of history, long forgotten but dredged up to fill a social media post with a fascinating factoid. Continue Reading

I loved meeting the people on platform 5 - a delightful story about connection and friendship in a disconnected world Marianne Cronin, author of The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot Balancing that sort of realness with the feel-good sense that life can become miraculously better (though, to be fair not without some hard work and pain; there’s no wand waving going on here) is a feat in and of itself and it’s one Pooley manages impressively well, forming up in the process a story that feel accessibly honest even as it inspires you to dream and hope big. Clare's dark but hilarious memoir, The Sober Diaries, has helped thousands of people around the world to quit drinking. THE AUTHENTICITY PROJECT is one of my favorite books and IONA IVERSON’S RULES FOR COMMUTING shines just as brightly, if not even brighter.

At first Iona seemed like she would be an Eleanor Oliphant type which initially raised hope. But as the story plays out we come to realize she's little more than an aging lesbian who enjoys counseling strangers she sees regularly on the train. To be honest, that sense of being enveloped in love and support is so profoundly present in The People on Platform 5 that it often feels like a great big warm hug; that’s not meant in any kind of flippant way at all but rather in the sense that being made to feel like you belong and matter is the one of the most powerful things you can do for anyone. You will absolutely fall in love with Iona and Emmie and Sanjay and Martha and Piers and Jake and David. You will wish you could spend time with them on their commute and be part of their precious, special group.It’s incredibly easy to read, it’s feel good, it’s warm, it’s certainly one to bump up your TBR list. But there is a way, and The People on Platform 5 shines a heartening light on it, reassuring us that no matter how trenchant a problem might be or how far off a solution might be, that it is there somewhere and we can often find it and live it out if we only have the love and support of people around us.

Heartwarming, funny, a delicious dive into the profound and ridiculous modern world in which we live. Clare Pooley reminds us why we need each other * Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author * Take Piers, for instance, a hedge fund trader who initially comes across as a man in full control of his bombastically expressed and rather overblown life as a hardcore, take-no-prisoners denizen of London’s financial district but who, over the course of The People on Platform 5 is revealed as someone struggling with a slew of issues that do not match the impressions others have of him.

This beautifully-written story, which rather audaciously dares to imagine what might happen if regular commuters on the same train line in London dared to actually speak to each other, is like a tonic for the soul because not only does it bring a number of lost big city souls into the kind of nurturing found family they all desperately need, but it does so in a way that helps them answer some big questions in their life and take some pretty positive steps forward. Survival against impossible extraterrestrial odds: Invasion ends its second season with hope … and not? (S2, E6-10) Then, one morning, Smart-but-Sexist Surbiton chokes on a grape right in front of Iona. Probably-a-Psychopath-New-Malden steps up to help and saves his life, and this one event sparks a chain reaction. This book is bursting with the kindness of strangers, and I was bursting with hope by the end of it * Jenny Bayliss * Clare’s memoir - The Sober Diaries - has helped thousands of people around the world to quit drinking.