Ron and Edie happen to win the lottery but Edie does not do well in the lottery of life! This story tells you what happened before winning the lottery, and after. Neither tale is exactly cheery. Ron and their son, Colin, enjoy the win by splashing the cash while Edie frets about everything.

Maybe she has good reason. She is dominated by Ron’s mother, she thinks he is having an affair, seems to find Colin quite obnoxious and has lost touch with her other son Sean who has been unofficially adopted by a posh rich couple – the wife is called Bianca! She has also had her tubes tied and doesn’t quite know why.

The trouble with the book is that most of this is, at least partly, her fault. She marries Ron and his mother, but doesn’t seem able to steer her life. One way to look at it, is that she is deeply depressed but, then, winning the lottery doesn’t seem to help. Eventually, she escapes to see her friend Patricia in Greece and that’s a disaster as well.

In the end, things get better after some unlikely plot twists and Edie cheers up but it’s not really satisfactory after all that has happened which makes for an unhappy read.