A sudden huge legacy, an unimaginable amount of money, dropped into a very ordinary life: what does it do to that life, how can it contain it, how can a balance possibly be maintained?
Cassia Fallon has been married to her doctor husband for seven years when her godmother leaves her half a million pounds. In 1935, that represents a vast fortune.
Slowly at first, then with gathering speed, the money begins to work on her. Determined to be sensible, to stay in control, to keep her life and her marriage well-adjusted, she finds herself nevertheless able to do exactly as she likes: with dangerous consequences. For there is much in her life that she is not happy with, however hard she tried to suppress the knowledge before.
She starts to question, to re-examine: her marriage, her past, her present, her future. The money gives her confidence, courage, insight; within a very short time she has resumed the medical career that was once of overpowering importance to her, shed some of her domestic burdens, re-formed old relationships. One of them of a most dangerous kind.
Thus Cassia finds that her windfall is liberating – but also corrupting. Not least because the need to know where it really came from soon becomes overpowering…
Penny Vincenzi’s Windfall is a rich, absorbing tale of temptation, ambition and desire.