Jojo Moyes, writer

Lauren Laverne· Host0:00

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes twenty-eight days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening. [waves crashing] [music] My castaway this week is the writer Jojo Moyes. Her books have been translated into forty-six languages, sold over fifty-seven million copies, and reached the number one spot in twelve countries. She grew up in East London, the daughter of two young hippies with a work ethic. Her own CV includes working in a minicab office and cutting her teeth as a journalist while writing fiction in her free time. Her breakthrough book, Me Before You, is the story of a young quadriplegic man who wants to end his life and the young woman who wants to persuade him not to. It was a global phenomenon and became a hit film, though she almost didn't write it. It was a fellow novelist who convinced her to keep going. She says: "The story of my life is launching into