BOOKS
Author Interview Jojo Moyes
The novel following Jojo Moyes’ hit trilogy Me Before You saw the author living deep in rural Kentucky to research a group of women librarians on horseback in the 1930s
Heloise Wood @saltounite J
ojo Moyes had been idly reading online two years ago when she came across a journal article containing black-and-white photos of women on horseback
carrying books. The Smithsonian magazine article about the Pack Horse Library of Kentucky inspired The Giver of Stars, a sprawling homage to female friendship, bravery and books, set in the American Midwest in the 1930s. She says she has never “enjoyed writing a book like I’ve enjoyed writing this”, writing it in a feverish nine-month period, with film rights snapped up before it had even reached her editor’s desk.
“I love this book so much that you’ll find it hard to shut me up,” she tells me as we begin our interview at her publisher Michael Joseph’s offices on the Strand. Previously the author had been mourning the end of the wildly successful Me Before You trilogy, which accounts for 63% of her total sales—a staggering £19.5m—through Nielsen BookScan UK, and triggered a 2016 film adapta- tion, which she worked on. It is her first historical novel since 2012, and Moyes reveals something spoke to her across almost a century from the Pack Horse Library’s members. “It was the pictures in the Smithsonian that stood out; these black- and-white pictures of women on horses against this
26 12th July 2019
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