Join Me!

Join Me! is Danny Wallace's true story of how a bored whim turned into a movement. In 2002 he placed a cryptic classified ad in a London paper simply reading "Join Me," with no explanation of what joining meant, and asked respondents to send a passport-sized photograph. He was inspired partly by boredom and partly by learning, at his great-uncle's funeral, that the man had once been mocked for trying to start a farming commune of his own.

Within weeks, letters and photos arrived from teachers, vicars, mechanics and pensioners, none of whom knew what they were signing up for. Wallace improvised a cause on the fly: every "Joinee" would perform one random act of kindness for a stranger every Friday — a "Good Friday" — and report back. The collective, thousands strong and growing, came to be known as the Karma Army.

Told in Wallace's wry, self-deprecating comic voice, the book is part memoir and part accidental social experiment, tracking how a throwaway gag outgrew its creator and became something closer to a real following.