'The Main Lesson I've Learnt? Persistence'

She’s one of our best-loved authors, but Jojo Moyes was about to give up writing when her novel Me Before You became a hit. She talks about how life has changed, and how her new book reveals what came next for her heroine Louisa Clark

- Jojo Moyes

As a child, I loved writing, but what I really wanted was to live in a stable.

I was a country-loving girl living in inner-city London, and totally obsessed with horses. On my 10th birthday, I arrived home from school to find my mom had filled my bedroom with hay.

It was everywhere, and I was overjoyed. In that moment, I was a horse! It must have been a total nightmare to clear up, but all I remember is elation.

Now, I’m living out my childhood dream on a farm in Essex

with my journalist husband, Charles (Arthur), and our children, Saskia, 19, Harry, 16, and Lockie, 12. We have two horses, a very old pony, two dogs (a 55kg Pyrenean mountain dog and a little border terrier, known as ‘big dog’ and ‘little dog’) and two cats. At least twice a day, Charles tells me we’re at ‘peak animal’, but I think there’s always room for more.

I’ve always written stories.

I first tried my hand at a novel in my 20s, when I was working night shifts as a journalist and had nothing to do during the day. When an agent said I ‘had a voice’, I became determined to make my fiction a success. Between 1995 and 2000,

I wrote three novels, but none of them led to anything. Finally, in 2002, I had my first book published, called Sheltering Rain. I wrote seven more after that, but none sold very well.

For 10 years, I loitered as a mid-list author,

beginning to feel that perhaps I simply wasn’t one of those writers that people wanted to read. I have a friend who once described being an author as ‘being paid to be disappointed once a year’, and that’s kind of how I felt. You put your heart and soul into a book. All you want is for people to read it.

I was feeling increasingly despondent,