Lou Clark is a young woman from a small English town with a simple, straitened life: she works at the Buttered Bun tea shop, has a long-term boyfriend named Patrick whom she cannot quite say she loves, knows exactly how many steps it takes to walk home from the bus stop, and never thinks too hard about her slightly muddled, slightly awkward days. Then the tea shop closes, she loses her job, and the family's financial pressure forces her to look for work. Will Traynor was once a London business elite who loved travel and extreme sports and ran both his career and his life with brilliance. A car accident leaves him a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair; his lover leaves, his friends drift away, and he shuts the door on his heart, expecting nothing from the rest of his life. With nowhere else to turn, Lou, who has no caregiving experience, becomes Will's private caregiver under a six-month contract. At first Lou has no confidence in caring for a man who is "dissatisfied with everything," and Will is deeply skeptical of this loudly dressed girl with no filter. Yet through one stumbling encounter after another—Lou takes him out to the races, to a concert, to a birthday dinner and a wedding—Will slowly opens up her narrow horizons and makes her dare, for the first time, to ask what she might still become. In each other's darkest days they light each other's way, and Lou grows ever more certain she can change the ending—until she finally discovers that Will has already made his decision about his own life. This novel is about companionship and farewell, about choice, dignity, and the value of existence: what a meeting can truly bring, whether a person has the right to decide his own endpoint, and whether loving someone means understanding him rather than holding him back.
乔乔·莫伊斯做过十年记者，擅长把平凡人的处境写得既好笑又疼人。《遇见你之前》把爱情、家庭、失业、疾病、死亡与人生意义一并放进一个极小的场景里：一间屋子、两个人、六个月的时间。露不是拯救者，威尔也不是等待被拯救的王子，小说最可贵的地方，是它没有把“爱” simplification 成“只要你努力，结局就会变好”，而是让两个人在相遇中各自完成了一次真正的成长。 这本书的节奏很适合都市读者：章节短、对话密、情节推进快，读起来几乎像在看电影；同时它又足够沉，读完会让人重新想一想“尊严”二字的分量。原著2012年出版后长期占据《纽约时报》等畅销榜，2016年被改编为同名电影，由艾米莉亚·克拉克与山姆·克拉弗林主演，让这个故事被更多读者记住。 苏心一的译文通俗顺畅，保留了露略带促狭的第一人称口吻。如果你读过《一个人的朝圣》《岛上书店》这类温和而有分量的外国小说，这本书会给你相似的阅读体验，也会多给你一点关于“告别”的思考。
Jojo Moyes is an author listed under the category of foreign literature. The library currently holds three of her works, including Me Before You, Someone Else's Shoes, and Slow Train Coming. Public information about her nationality, dates of birth and death, and English name is limited, so no speculation is made here. Judging from the available works, she excels at narratives centered on emotional relationships and life-changing moments, addressing themes such as choice, loss, and personal growth within the framework of popular love stories. Me Before You became widely known through its film adaptation of the same name, bringing her work broader attention among readers and viewers, while Someone Else's Shoes and Slow Train Coming continue her approach of letting characters' circumstances and emotional shifts drive the story.
