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 Jess Thomas and her children to a Math Olympiad in Scotland. The confined, shared space of Ed’s car forces this disparate group to confront their vulnerabilities and prejudices, fostering personal growth and creating bonds. Like Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012), which transforms a walk across England into a journey of repentance and renewal, travel in One Plus One dramatizes emotional connections and personal growth.

Moyes situates her characters within the context of a nontraditional family unit. At the time of the novel’s publication in 2014, there were “2.0 million lone parents with dependent children in the UK” (“Families and households in the UK: 2014.” Office for National Statistics). The novel’s portrayal of Jess’s blended family—consisting of her daughter, Tanzie, and her stepson, Nicky—reflects this changing landscape. Jess herself acknowledges this reality, remarking that unconventional families are “how families are these days” (10). By placing this modern family within a classic road trip framework, Moyes explores how familial love and resilience are defined not by traditional structures but by shared experience and mutual support.