Charlie Churchill is the odd one out, the ugly duckling in a dysfunctional all-female Liverpool family. She's the one who works a forty hour week, pays the bills and provides a modicum of common sense, plus - when she has time - a healthy cooked meal to balance the takeaways and ready meals the others thrive on. She's the one who looks like her deceased Dad, while Georgie and her illegitimate daughter Rosie (father the elusive Arsehole Alan) look like Mum. Slim, blonde, leggy and beautiful. It's too soon to tell with Georgie's baby Daisy (also illegitimate, father unkwn but the consequence of a night's clubbing). Daisy, still bald-headed, currently resembles Harry Hill without the specs but will doubt metamorphose into yet ather blonde Churchill beauty. Charlie's escape from the shadow of her family is the Sundowners Retirement Home, where she has worked for the past five years as a lowly carer. Here, surrounded by her 'wrinklies' as Georgie calls them, she can forget her daily concerns: the fact that her life is going where, that she's still a virgin at thirty-two, that there's likelihood of ever finding a husband or having a family of her own, that she's insufficiently educated or qualified to climb the ladder of success. But when Dingo, her favourite resident, dies and leaves her a fortune, her life changes dramatically. How she copes with becoming a millionaire and carrying out his last wishes against a background of suspicion, envy, hostility and eventually a tragedy, is the theme of this vel.
Joy Wodhams has been writing as long as she can remember. She is the descendant of five generations of theatre and circus gymnasts, trapeze artists, singers, musicians and songwriters. As far as she's aware she is the first fiction writer in the family. At the age of seven she created her first magazine, selling it to her circle of friends for the sum of one old penny. Many years later she became a real magazine editor and then went on to sell short stories and features to national magazines and to tutor in both Creative Writing and Art. Nine of her novels for both adults and children have now been published.