The Girl You Left Behind (Jojo Moyes)
The Girl You Left Behind, Jojo Moyes
Jojo Moyes is a British novelist and one of only a few authors to have won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice, for her books Foreign Fruit (2004) and The Last Letter From Your Lover (2011). Her 2012 novel The Girl You Left Behind follows two women who were born nearly a century apart but are united by a painting and their determination to fight for the one thing they love most. Before the story even starts there are seven pages of reviews from both established companies and ordinary people, all praising Moyes’ previous bestseller Me Before You (2012), so there was a huge expectation on this novel to be just as good, and I was certainly not disappointed.
We are brought into a German occupied village of France in 1916 and introduced to Sophie Lefevre who is struggling to run the family business under the new German laws whilst also praying for the safe return of her husband who is fighting at the Front. Moyes shows us how Sophie has changed both physically and mentally through the hardships of the war by including flashbacks to when Sophie was living in Paris as a young carefree shop girl. The inclusion of these flashbacks ensures that we fully understand Sophie as a character and when we learn about the loving relationship she has with her husband we are able to understand her determination to do anything to get him back especially when she finds out he has been captured and taken to a German war camp.
Moyes’ ability to describe the surroundings of that time completely draws you in and she is not afraid to shock the reader and leave them desperate to know more. When we are transported out of Sophie’s world we are left not knowing what happened to her at a most crucial and painful time in her life and are instead thrown into the modern world and life of Liv Halston. We soon find out that the two women are connected as Liv has in her possession a portrait painting of Sophie that had originally been painted by Sophie’s husband and had been her most prized possession. A chance encounter throws the portraits’ ownership into question and Liv is left fighting to keep hold of a painting that was a honeymoon present from her recently deceased husband. As the story continues Liv finds out Sophie’s history and it is through her and her friends that we uncover the rest of Sophie’s story. And what a story that was! The Girl You Left Behind is by no means a true story but the way that Moyes has written this novel the characters, particularly Sophie, become very real and it definitely brought a tear to my eye when the rest of Sophie’s history was revealed!
The common theme between the two girls is the love they had for their husbands which only intensified when they were both gone. Sophie becomes desperate to hear any news of his whereabouts and then commits a crime in the belief that it will lead her to him and to safety. Liv hasn’t been near another man in the four years since her husband’s sudden death and the painting starts out being important to her because it was a present from him but as she learns of the history towards the painting she is desperate to keep hold of it because she feels like she understands and knows Sophie more than anyone else could.
Overall I would thoroughly recommend this novel, you become completely drawn into both worlds and feel a personal connection to both Sophie and Liv and their fight for love in hard times. The switching between the two women is seamless and it is easy to know which century you are in for each chapter. The mystery of Sophie’s life keeps you hooked and desperately wanting to know what happened to her, I definitely preferred her story to Liv’s but that might be because Sophie’s was filled with more hardships and heartache as well as romance making you have more of a personal connection towards her. Having devoured The Girl You Left Behind from cover to cover, it is clear that Moyes is a brilliant writer and I shall definitely be looking up her other novels!
