Joseph does various part-time jobs including, football coaching, baby-sitting and working in the local butcher’s, is twenty-two years old, and black. Lucy, a separated mother of two, is Head of the English Department at the local high school, forty-two years old and white. When Lucy Fairfax and Joseph Campbell embark on their relationship, neither is looking too closely at the reasons, or the likely outcome: they are acting on mutual attraction, and find that they enjoy each other’s company. Just Like You is the eighth novel by award-winning British author, Nick Hornby. Just Like You is a brilliantly observed, tender, but also brutally funny new novel that gets to the heart of what it means to fall surprisingly and headlong in love with the best possible person-someone you didn't see coming. But sometimes it turns out that the person who can make you happiest is the one you least expect, though it can take some maneuvering to see it through. He's of a different class, a different culture, and a different generation. It's not a match anyone one could have predicted. Joseph is twenty-two, living at home with his mother, and working several jobs, including the butcher counter where he and Lucy meet. So when she meets Joseph, she isn't exactly looking for love-she's more in the market for a babysitter. Now, two decades later, she's a nearly-divorced, forty-one-year-old schoolteacher with two school-aged sons, and there is no script anymore.

She met a guy just like herself: same age, same background, same hopes and dreams they got married and started a family. Lucy used to handle her adult romantic life according to the script she'd been handed. This warm, wise, highly entertaining twenty-first century love story is about what happens when the person who makes you happiest is someone you never expected.

1995 nick hornby novel