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Before Me Before You, Jojo Moyes had published eight novels and, in her own words, been “a fairly unsuccessful author for so long”. She had spent about ten years as a reporter and editor at The Independent, written her books mostly for romance readers, and twice won the Romantic Novel of the Year award. Then a 2012 novel about a carer and the paralysed man who has booked his own death at Dignitas went on to sell more than 15 million copies and became a film with Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin. Her books have now sold more than 57 million copies in 46 languages. This guide covers her 14 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 key books · 2002–2025 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Jojo Moyes has written 16 novels. The best known are Me Before You (2012), its sequels After You (2015) and Still Me (2018), The Last Letter from Your Lover (2010) and The Giver of Stars (2019). Start with Me Before You; then read on for which earlier books are worth going back to and where the Louisa Clark series goes next.
Where to Start with Jojo Moyes
If you want the book that made her name
→ Me Before You (2012) — Louisa Clark and Will Traynor.
If you want historical fiction
→ The Giver of Stars (2019) — the packhorse librarians of 1930s Kentucky.
If you want a love story told in letters
→ The Last Letter from Your Lover (2010) — a 1960 affair found in a newspaper archive.
If you want something lighter and recent
→ Someone Else’s Shoes (2023) — two women and a swapped gym bag.
14 Jojo Moyes Books, in Order
Sheltering Rain
Her first novel, also published as Return to Ireland. It follows three generations of women — Joy, who married in 1950s Hong Kong, her daughter Kate and her granddaughter Sabine — when Sabine is sent to stay with her grandparents in Ireland.
Foreign Fruit
Also published as Windfallen. A seaside town in the 1950s is unsettled by a group of bohemians in a modernist house called Arcadia; decades later a young mother arrives to restore the house. It won the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romantic Novel of the Year in 2004.
The Ship of Brides
In 1946 four Australian women who married British servicemen during the war, Margaret, Avice, Frances and Jean, sail to Britain on the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious, which carried 655 war brides. Moyes based it on her grandmother, Betty McKee, who made the voyage. Chapters open with extracts from real journals and newspapers.
Silver Bay
In a whale-watching town in New South Wales, a woman hiding from her past and the family who run the local hotel are disturbed by Mike Dormer, an Englishman sent to scout the bay for a development. It was Good Housekeeping’s Book of the Year for 2007 and was shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year in 2008.
The Horse Dancer
Sarah, a fourteen-year-old in London trained in classical riding by her grandfather, a former rider with the French Cadre Noir, crosses paths with Natasha, a lawyer in a failing marriage. It was adapted for German television as Im Schatten das Licht (2020).
The Last Letter from Your Lover
A journalist, Ellie, finds a letter from 1960 in her newspaper’s archive in which a man asks his lover to leave her husband, and starts to trace the affair while caught up with a married man herself. It won Romantic Novel of the Year in 2011, her second win. Netflix released a film adaptation in 2021.
Me Before You
Louisa Clark, out of work in a small English town, becomes a carer for Will Traynor, a former City high-flyer left paralysed after an accident, who has agreed to give his parents six months before an assisted death in Switzerland. It has sold more than 15 million copies. The 2016 film, with a screenplay by Moyes, grossed over 200 million dollars.
The Girl You Left Behind
In a German-occupied French town in 1916, Sophie Lefèvre’s portrait, painted by her husband, catches the eye of the Kommandant. Nearly a century later the painting hangs in the London home of a young widow, Liv Halston, when a restitution claim is made for it.
One Plus One
Jess Thomas, a single mother short of money, needs to get her maths-gifted daughter to an Olympiad in Scotland. Ed Nicholls, a tech entrepreneur in legal trouble, ends up driving the family there.
After You
The first sequel to Me Before You. Louisa, still grieving, works in an airport bar in London until a teenage girl with a connection to Will turns up at her door. With Me Before You it earned Nielsen Platinum and Gold awards for UK sales.
Still Me
Louisa moves to New York to work for a wealthy Manhattan family and has to decide who she is apart from the people around her. It won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2018.
The Giver of Stars
Alice, an Englishwoman who marries the American Bennett Van Cleve, finds herself stifled in small-town Kentucky and joins Margery O’Hare and the Packhorse Librarians, who carried books into the mountains under a 1930s Works Progress Administration scheme. It was a Reese’s Book Club pick and was shortlisted for Fiction Book of the Year at the 2020 British Book Awards.
Someone Else’s Shoes
Sam Kemp, a worn-down Londoner, picks up the wrong gym bag and finds a pair of designer heels. Their owner, Nisha Cantor, has just been cut off by her rich husband and takes a cleaning job in the building where she used to live while she hunts for them, until the two women decide to help each other.
We All Live Here
Lila Kennedy, a writer whose husband left soon after her book on saving a marriage came out, is grieving her mother and sharing a crowded house with her stepfather Bill when her long-absent actor father, Gene, moves in too.
In What Order to Read Jojo Moyes
Most of her novels stand alone and can be read in any order. The exception is the Louisa Clark series: Me Before You (2012), After You (2015) and Still Me (2018), which should be read in that order, with the short story Lou in Lockdown (2020) as a coda.
Publication order shows a shift. The books before 2012 were sold mostly as romance and lean on dual timelines and family secrets; from Me Before You on, the hook is usually a moral problem or a reversal of fortune, written with more comedy.
A reading path
1. Me Before You (2012)
2. The Last Letter from Your Lover (2010)
3. The Giver of Stars (2019)
4. After You (2015)
5. Someone Else’s Shoes (2023)
Everything Else Jojo Moyes Published
Beyond the 14 key books: 5 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other novels
2
2 books · 2004–2008
- 2004The Peacock Emporiuma woman opens a shop in a small English market town
- 2008Night Musica widowed violinist inherits a decaying house in the country
Novellas and short fiction
3
3 books · 2012–2020
- 2012Honeymoon in Parisa novella linked to The Girl You Left Behind
- 2015Paris for One and Other Storiesa novella and short stories
- 2020Lou in Lockdowna Louisa Clark short story
The years · 1969–2025
Quick facts about Jojo Moyes
- Known for
- Jojo Moyes is known for warm, funny, often heartbreaking popular novels built around a moral dilemma, above all Me Before You and its heroine Louisa Clark.
- 1969
- Born in Maidstone, Kent
- 1992
- Bursary from The Independent to study journalism
- 2002
- First novel, Sheltering Rain
- 2012
- Me Before You
- 2025
- We All Live Here
- Born
- Pauline Sara Jo Moyes, 4 August 1969, Maidstone, Kent
- Education
- Royal Holloway, University of London; postgraduate journalism at City University
- Journalism
- About ten years at The Independent, including a year at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong
- Awards
- Romantic Novel of the Year, 2004 and 2011
- Sales
- More than 57 million copies, in 46 languages
- Screen
- Wrote the screenplay for Me Before You (2016)
The red mark is 2012: Me Before You, the novel that turned her into an international bestseller.
How Jojo Moyes Writes: A Dilemma at the Centre
Her most successful books start from a hard question rather than a romance: whether a paralysed man has the right to end his life, who owns a painting taken in wartime, what happens when a rich woman loses everything overnight. Moyes has said that when she wrote Me Before You “the issue of quality of life was probably to the front of my mind”, because two relatives were facing life in care homes.
She works visually. In a 2015 interview with Writer’s Digest she said she has to play scenes out “cinematically” in her head before she can be sure they work, which also explains her move into screenwriting. Many of the earlier books use two timelines, joining a story from the 1910s, 1940s or 1960s to a present-day woman who uncovers it.
Her journalism shows in the research behind the historical novels: the 1946 war-bride voyage in The Ship of Brides, drawn from her grandmother’s own crossing, and the Kentucky packhorse librarians in The Giver of Stars. The later books are lighter in tone, with ensemble casts and more comedy, but keep the same focus on women whose circumstances change suddenly.
Frequently asked questions about Jojo Moyes’s books
How many books has Jojo Moyes written?
Sixteen novels, from Sheltering Rain (2002) to We All Live Here (2025), plus a novella, Honeymoon in Paris, the collection Paris for One and Other Stories and the short story Lou in Lockdown. This page covers 14 key books.
What are Jojo Moyes’s books in order?
The key books are Sheltering Rain (2002), Foreign Fruit (2003), The Ship of Brides (2005), Silver Bay (2007), The Horse Dancer (2009), The Last Letter from Your Lover (2010), Me Before You (2012), The Girl You Left Behind (2012), One Plus One (2014), After You (2015), Still Me (2018), The Giver of Stars (2019), Someone Else’s Shoes (2023) and We All Live Here (2025). The Peacock Emporium (2004) and Night Music (2008) complete the novels.
Where should I start with Jojo Moyes?
With Me Before You (2012), the book that made her name and the start of the Louisa Clark series. If you prefer historical fiction, start with The Giver of Stars.
What is Jojo Moyes’s most famous book?
Me Before You (2012). It has sold more than 15 million copies and was filmed in 2016 with Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin, from Moyes’s own screenplay.
What order should I read the Me Before You books in?
Me Before You (2012), After You (2015), then Still Me (2018). The short story Lou in Lockdown (2020) follows Louisa Clark during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Which Jojo Moyes books have been made into films?
Me Before You (2016), directed by Thea Sharrock; The Last Letter from Your Lover (2021), released by Netflix; and The Horse Dancer, adapted for German television as Im Schatten das Licht (2020). A film of The Giver of Stars was announced by Universal in 2020.
Why was Me Before You controversial?
Disability-rights campaigners criticised the book and the 2016 film for presenting Will’s assisted death as the natural end for a man with severe disabilities. Members of the group Not Dead Yet picketed the London premiere in May 2016. Moyes told CBC News: “I think it’s true to his character.”
Was The Giver of Stars plagiarised?
In October 2019 Kim Michele Richardson, author of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (published in May 2019), said The Giver of Stars had “alarming similarities” to her novel; both draw on the real packhorse librarians of 1930s Kentucky. Moyes’s US publisher, Pamela Dorman Books at Penguin Random House, called it “wholly original work”. No legal finding was reported.
Has Jojo Moyes won any awards?
She won the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romantic Novel of the Year twice, for Foreign Fruit (2004) and The Last Letter from Your Lover (2011). Still Me won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2018.
Is Jojo Moyes British?
Yes. She was born in Maidstone, Kent, on 4 August 1969, worked as a journalist at The Independent in London and lives in London.
Footnotes
- Jojo Moyes — Wikipedia
- Me Before You (novel) — Wikipedia
- Jojo Moyes — official website
- PRH US stands by Jojo Moyes — The Bookseller
- Me Before You riles disability activists — CBC News
- Jojo Moyes: bonus interview outtakes — Writer’s Digest
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“You need clear thinking time to unravel problems and to come up with good characters.”
— Jojo Moyes, interview with Writer’s Digest (2015)
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