One Plus One: A Novel

Jojo Moyes’s One Plus One employs the classic road trip narrative, a literary subgenre in which a physical journey catalyzes emotional transformation and forges unlikely bonds. Its lineage can be traced to literary works in which the road offers freedom, escape from traditional structures and routines, and the possibility of forming new connections and identities.

One of the most enduring road trip novels is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), which defined the road as a site of rebellion and existential yearning. However, while Kerouac focuses on disaffected young men in pursuit of meaning, Moyes adapts the subgenre to focus on contemporary questions of class, caregiving, and family. A more recent precedent is Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988), which follows a young woman who flees her small town in a beat-up car and unexpectedly becomes the guardian of an abandoned child. As in Moyes’s novel, the protagonist of The Bean Trees builds a found family through hardship and compassion, illustrating how being on the road can forge relationships.

In One Plus One, tech millionaire Ed Nicholls impulsively agrees to drive single mother