Where to Start with Jojo Moyes: A Reading Guide

Jojo Moyes (born 1969) is the British novelist and journalist who became one of the bestselling novelists of the 2010s with Me Before You (2012) — a romantic novel of unusual moral courage that refused the expected happy ending and sparked a worldwide conversation about disability, autonomy, and the right to die. Her fiction combines the warm accessibility of commercial women’s fiction with a genuine willingness to engage difficult subjects: class, disability, grief, and the constraints that history places on women’s choices. Her books have sold more than forty million copies worldwide.

Where to Start: Me Before You (2012)

The essential Moyes — and one of the most discussed romantic novels of the past twenty years. Louisa Clark, a cheerful young woman from a working-class family in a small English town, takes a job as caregiver to Will Traynor, a quadriplegic former investment banker who has lost everything he valued about his previous life. Their relationship develops with warmth and specificity; Will Traynor is one of contemporary romance’s most fully realised male protagonists.

The novel’s distinction is its refusal to provide the expected ending: Moyes makes a morally difficult decision that generated both admiration for its courage and criticism from disability rights advocates. Both responses are legitimate, and the novel’s willingness to engage difficult territory rather than retreat into sentiment is what makes it more than a conventional tearjerker. Genuinely moving and genuinely brave.

The Last Letter from Your Lover (2010)

Moyes’s most structurally ambitious novel — and an excellent introduction for readers who want something with more historical texture. Two love stories set forty years apart: Jennifer Stirling in 1960s London, trapped in a loveless marriage and conducting a passionate affair with a journalist, and Ellie Haworth in the present day, who discovers the letters from the affair in a newspaper archive and becomes obsessed with how the story ended. The 1960s sections — glamorous, atmospheric, emotionally compelling — are the stronger half; Moyes captures the constraints placed on women of that era with particular skill.

Best read before Me Before You or as a standalone — it is complete in itself.

After You (2015)

The direct sequel to Me Before You — Louisa Clark navigating grief, unexpected connections, and the question of how to live fully after catastrophic loss. Moyes trades the moral weight of the first novel for something warmer and more comedic: the novel is less challenging and more conventionally hopeful than its predecessor. Readers who want to continue Louisa’s story will find it satisfying; readers looking for the emotional intensity of Me Before You should approach with adjusted expectations.

Best read after Me Before You.

One Plus One (2014)

Moyes’s most class-conscious novel — a warmhearted comedy about Jess Thomas, a financially desperate single mother who is scraping by on two jobs, and Ed Nicholls, a wealthy tech entrepreneur who gives her and her family a lift to Scotland in his car when they cannot afford the journey. The novel is funny, compassionate, and particularly good on the texture of financial precarity — the decisions that poverty forces, the exhaustion of maintaining dignity under constant material pressure. Her most immediately enjoyable standalone.

Reading Jojo Moyes

Moyes’s fiction is distinguished by her warmth for her characters and her refusal to look away from the difficult implications of the situations she creates. She is not a literary novelist; her prose is accessible and her plots are conventional in outline. But within that form, she takes real emotional and moral risks — Me Before You remains controversial for the right reasons — and she writes about class with a specificity and sympathy that is rare in mainstream romantic fiction. Begin with Me Before You for the most important and the most discussed; try The Last Letter from Your Lover for her most structurally accomplished work.