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Review: After You by Jojo Moyes

BY James Walton

1st Jan 2015 Book Reviews

Review: After You by Jojo Moyes

Jojo Moyes is back with After YouAutumn's biggest sequel.

After You by Jojo Moyes  

The author

After chugging along as a largely overlooked writer for ten years, Jojo Moyes suddenly hit the big time in 2012 with Me Before You—a huge global best-seller that’s now being turned into what book covers used to call “a major motion picture”.

In the meantime, she’s written a sequel that looks sure to be one of the big novels of the autumn. 

 

The review 

Set 18 months after the enormously likable Louisa Clark reluctantly took the quadriplegic Will to the Dignitas clinic, After You certainly isn’t short of incidents—or moral dilemmas—of its own. When the novel opens, for example, Louisa is working at a London airport’s Irish pub that’s “as Irish as Mahatma Gandhi”.

There, amid her overwhelming grief, she has to upsell dry roasted peanuts and wear a mini-skirted green outfit that makes her look like “a porno pixie”.

Yet what makes Moyes one of the very best writers of women’s commercial fiction (apparently the word “chick-lit” isn’t encouraged anymore) is how beautifully she combines even the most heartbreaking elements with sharply observed comedy—and how well she roots both in a wholly recognisable modern Britain. 

Feature image via Beyond Books

 

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