JOJO MOYES MICHAEL JOSEPH, $38

Reviewed by Felicity Price

Louisa Clark is back for the third time in this follow-up to Me Before You (where she nursed and fell in love with quadriplegic Will Traynor until he ended his life at a Swiss assisted-suicide clinic) and After You (where, after much grieving, she eventually found comfort with Ambulance Sam, who scooped her up and saved her life after she drunkenly fell through a balcony awning two floors below her high-rise flat). Still Me picks up from there when Lou heads off to New York to be a companion to Agnes Gopnik, the Romanian second wife of a super-wealthy Wall Street businessman. Ambulance Sam has encouraged her to go because she desperately needs to start anew and even Lou can see her life isn’t the vibrant one Will wanted for her. But as Lou gets caught up in Agnes’ New York Society, it soon becomes obvious the solid, comfortable and straight-up Sam is going to get left behind. Especially

when Lou meets a handsome finance-man who brings back strong memories of Will, and Sam’s new ambulance partner posts way too many pictures of him on Facebook.

Somewhere in her helter-skelter life, Lou needs to find herself. She is only too well aware she doesn’t know just who she is any more. She has spent a long time looking after others, adapting herself to fit in with their needs, feeling split in two a lot of the time, between two worlds on either side of the Atlantic. At some point, she will have to stop hiding and prevaricating, and think it through.

The colourful, credible characters in Still Me, the author’s easy style, the sense of humour that lifts you up just when it’s getting a bit dark make for a read so compelling it’s hard to put the book down, right until the movie-style ending. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if all three books in this trilogy make it to the cinema, based on the popularity of the 2016 movie Me Before

You. But Jojo Moyes has made it clear, Still Me is the last time we’ll see Louisa Clark in print.