Jojo Moyes

Jojo Moyes's latest novel, After You, is a sequel to the international bestseller, Me Before You. From her Q & A with Hannah Beckerman for the Guardian:

Your novels feature characters who are outsiders: the “leftovers”, as one character describes them. Why are you drawn to people living on the periphery, whether emotionally, physically or economically?

Because I think a lot of us feel that way. There’s not much interesting to me about people who fit happily into a group and whose life is fulfilled. I’m much more fascinated by the tension that comes from people not quite fitting with their surroundings. And I think most of us will spend some part of our lives feeling that we don’t.

Is that why so many of your female characters are often very ordinary, quite troubled, and in unglamorous jobs?

I feel like I’ve lived lots of different lives. Some of those lives involved doing some of those bottom-of-the-rung jobs and you learn an awful lot about human nature when you’re working in a minicab office late at night or serving drinks in a bar. I’m not intrigued by gilded lives at all. I’m curious about what happens to those people struggling to get somewhere in a society that increasingly tells them they can’t succeed, where...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue