Below is the complete list of Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Me Before You Books
- Lou In Lockdown (2020)
In the Me Before You series, Lou In Lockdown is book #4 and was published in 2020.
About Me Before You
Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You series is a three-book contemporary fiction sequence centered on Louisa Clark, an ordinary young woman whose life is changed by love, grief, moral conflict, and the difficult process of becoming more fully herself. The trilogy begins with Me Before You, continues with After You, and concludes with Still Me. Although the first book is the most famous, the full series is not only the story of Lou and Will Traynor. It is the story of Lou’s life before, during, and after the relationship that forces her to question the smallness of the future she had accepted.
Me Before You introduces Lou as a cheerful, eccentric, underemployed young woman from a working-class family in an English town where opportunity feels limited and duty often comes before desire. When she loses her café job, she becomes a caregiver and companion for Will Traynor, a wealthy former businessman and adventurer who has been left quadriplegic after an accident. Their relationship begins awkwardly, shaped by class difference, anger, dependence, embarrassment, and Lou’s lack of experience with the world Will once inhabited. Gradually, however, Lou’s warmth and stubbornness draw Will into a renewed emotional connection, while Will challenges Lou to imagine a larger life for herself.
The first novel is often described as a romance, but it is more complicated than that. It is also about bodily autonomy, disability, family pressure, money, caregiving, depression, and the limits of love as rescue. Will does not become a simple inspirational figure, and Lou is not transformed into a heroine through sacrifice alone. The book’s controversy and emotional force both come from the same place: Moyes places a love story inside a moral situation that cannot be resolved neatly for every reader.
After You shifts the focus to aftermath. Rather than giving Lou a clean new beginning, Moyes follows her through grief, guilt, stasis, and a kind of suspended life. Lou has promised to live boldly, but wanting to honor that promise is not the same as knowing how. The sequel introduces Lily, whose arrival forces Lou to confront Will’s past in unexpected ways, and Sam Fielding, whose presence opens the possibility of love after loss. The book matters because it resists the idea that a life-changing relationship automatically teaches someone how to live afterward. Lou’s recovery is uneven, sometimes messy, and often uncomfortable.
Still Me completes the trilogy by moving Lou to New York, where she works for a wealthy family and must navigate class performance, ambition, loyalty, and distance from the people who know her best. This final book is less about surviving grief and more about choosing identity. Lou is no longer only the woman who loved Will or the woman trying to recover from him. She is someone deciding what kind of work, love, clothing, confidence, and future belong to her.
The series is best read in publication order because Lou’s emotional development is cumulative. Me Before You breaks open her narrow life; After You shows the difficulty of continuing after that rupture; Still Me gives her space to define herself beyond grief, romance, and obligation.
The Me Before You trilogy endures because Moyes understands that transformation is rarely clean. Lou Clark’s journey is funny, painful, romantic, controversial, and deeply human. She begins as someone who has learned to make herself useful to others, and the series follows her toward the harder task of building a life that is truly her own.