Jojo Moyes

Growing up in Hackney in an "unhorsey" family, Jojo earned money from cleaning jobs, bought her first horse without telling her parents and created her own dream world, weaving in and out of traffic on horseback. In this first episode of Shelf Help to talks to Kate Weinberg about how much she identified with Velvet Brown, the protagonist of "National Velvet", and how the unlikely story of a butcher's daughter's passion and determination to win the Grand National inspired a lifetime of determination and "slightly ill-advised persistence", which included years of glass ceilings and rejected manuscripts before the life-changing success of "Me Before You".