After You was published by Michael Joseph (Penguin) in 2015, the sequel that Me Before You’s millions of readers demanded. Where the first novel asked whether love is enough to justify life, the sequel asks the harder question: how do you live after the person you loved has chosen to die?
Louisa Clark is stuck. Eighteen months after Will’s death, she works in a bar at an airport (going nowhere, watching others leave), lives in a flat above the bar, and drinks too much. Will left her money and a letter urging her to “live boldly” — but grief has made boldness impossible. She cannot move forward because moving forward feels like betrayal: if she enjoys life, does that mean Will was wrong to end his?
A fall from her rooftop (accident or something more deliberate — Moyes leaves it ambiguous) puts her in hospital and then in a grief support group, where she encounters people processing every variety of loss. Then Lily appears — a sixteen-year-old claiming to be Will’s daughter from a brief relationship. Lily is angry, lost, and inconvenient — and she forces Lou to reconnect with the Traynor family and with the reality that Will’s life had consequences beyond their love story.
The novel avoids the trap of providing Lou with a replacement love interest as easy resolution. Her recovery is gradual, nonlinear, and honest — driven not by romance but by responsibility (to Lily, to herself, to Will’s memory) and by the slow recognition that grief and life are not incompatible.
Collecting After You
First edition (Michael Joseph / Penguin, London, 2015): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $10–$20
- Signed first edition: $20–$50