A short life of the author
Pauline Sara Jo Moyes (b. 1969) was born on 4 August 1969 in Maidstone, Kent, England. She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, and worked as a journalist at the Independent for ten years. She lives on a farm in Essex.
Life and Career
Her early novels — Sheltering Rain (2002), Foreign Fruit (2003), The Last Letter from Your Lover (2011) — were commercially successful in the UK but it was Me Before You (2012) that made her a global phenomenon. The novel — about Louisa Clark, a young woman hired as a carer for Will Traynor, a formerly active man paralysed from the neck down who is planning to end his life at a Swiss euthanasia clinic — sold over 14 million copies and was translated into forty-six languages. The 2016 film, starring Emilia Clarke, grossed over $200 million.
The controversy around the novel’s ending — Will chooses assisted dying despite his relationship with Louisa — generated significant debate about disability representation in fiction. Two sequels followed: After You (2015) and Still Me (2018).
The Giver of Stars (2019) — based on the true story of the Pack Horse Librarians of Depression-era Kentucky — was her most critically acclaimed novel and her first major historical fiction.
Major Works and Themes
Moyes writes about ordinary women whose lives are transformed by extraordinary circumstances — bereavement, displacement, moral dilemmas. Her fiction is emotionally generous and accessible.
Key Works
- Me Before You (2012)
- The Giver of Stars (2019)
- The Last Letter from Your Lover (2011)
Collecting Moyes
Me Before You (2012, Michael Joseph UK) brings $20–$50. Moyes signs at UK events.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| After You The sequel to Me Before You follows Louisa Clark eighteen months after Will Traynor's death — paralyzed by grief, working a meaningless job, living above a bar — until a fall from her roof and the arrival of a teenage girl claiming to be Will's daughter force her to decide whether she will honor Will's final gift (money to live boldly) or spend her life mourning what she lost. | 2015 | Michael Joseph / Penguin | English |
| Me Before You Moyes's international bestseller follows Louisa Clark, a quirky small-town girl hired as companion to Will Traynor — a once-adventurous man now quadriplegic after a motorcycle accident — as their relationship develops against the backdrop of his determination to end his life through assisted suicide, raising questions the novel refuses to answer simply about autonomy, love, and what constitutes a life worth living. | 2012 | Michael Joseph / Penguin | English |
| One Plus One Moyes's road-trip romance follows a struggling single mother driving her mathematically gifted daughter to a competition in a broken-down car — joined by a disgraced tech millionaire hiding from a scandal — as the journey forces two people from opposite ends of the social spectrum to confront their assumptions about class, money, and what constitutes a good life. | 2014 | Michael Joseph / Penguin | English |
| Sheltering Rain Moyes's debut novel follows three generations of women in an Anglo-Irish family — a grandmother who married into the horse-racing gentry, a daughter who fled to Hong Kong, and a granddaughter caught between them — exploring how family secrets and silences calcify over decades and how the courage to speak can come too late. | 2002 | Hodder & Stoughton | English |
| Someone Else's Shoes Moyes's comedy of errors begins when two women at a gym accidentally swap bags — one gaining a pair of £600 Christian Louboutin shoes that transform her confidence, the other losing the only beautiful thing she had left — a novel about how objects carry identity, how a single possession can represent an entire life, and how women reinvent themselves when everything else is taken away. | 2022 | Michael Joseph / Penguin | English |
| Still Me The third Louisa Clark novel sends her to New York as assistant to a wealthy couple on the Upper East Side — where she navigates class, ambition, a long-distance relationship, and the question of how to remain yourself while reinventing your life — completing the trilogy's arc from grief through recovery to genuine self-determination. | 2018 | Michael Joseph / Penguin | English |
| The Girl You Left Behind Moyes's dual-timeline novel connects a World War I artist's wife in occupied France — forced to give a portrait to a German commandant — with a contemporary widow fighting a legal battle to keep the same painting, exploring how art carries memory across centuries and how the stories behind objects can transform the present. | 2012 | Michael Joseph / Penguin | English |
| The Giver of Stars Based on the true story of the Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky during the Depression, Moyes's historical novel follows five women who deliver books on horseback to remote Appalachian communities — a story of female friendship, intellectual freedom, and the transformative power of reading in a world that wants to keep women (and knowledge) in their place. | 2019 | Michael Joseph / Penguin | English |
| The Horse Dancer Moyes's novel follows a teenage girl devoted to her grandfather's classical dressage training — when he suffers a stroke, she must protect his horse from being sold and continue her training alone — a story about discipline, devotion, and the bond between humans and horses that connects the classical riding tradition (the capriole, the levade) to a modern London council estate. | 2009 | Hodder & Stoughton | English |
| The Last Letter from Your Lover Moyes's epistolary romance connects a 1960s society wife conducting a passionate affair through letters with a contemporary journalist who discovers the correspondence in an archive — a dual-timeline love story that explores how written words preserve desire across decades and how the conventions of different eras shape what can and cannot be expressed. | 2011 | Hodder & Stoughton | English |