THE SPLENDID TICKET

Angie Bigelow has won the jackpot: a $324 million lottery ticket. How will she spend the money? Will she share it with the father of her children, dissolute Dean Lee Grandet—even though he’s an inveterate gambler she plans on leaving? Angie, the lost soul at the center of Bill Cotter’s poignant and darkly comic novel, The Splendid Ticket, is facing this dilemma when a new tragedy tears through their household. Is that mere slip of numbered paper in the watch pocket of Angie’s Levi’s their ticket to freedom or the beginning of the end? In a fast-moving plot, shot through with originality and heart, this is the story of the Grandets discovering the alchemy that holds their family together, testing its limits and running headlong into whatever their futures hold.

Set in the verdant and sun-soaked Texas Hill Country, The Splendid Ticket tracks the push and pull, the bitter tension and the potent attraction, between these two impulsive individuals—and everyone caught in the storm that surrounds them.

Praise for The Splendid Ticket

“Fast-paced, frenetic, and wildly entertaining.”
—Chicago Review of Books

“Fair warning: This book will break your heart before making it a little stronger.”
—The Austin Chronicle

“Colorful […] there’s much to admire in Cotter’s story of rebirth and fate.”
–Publishers Weekly

“Bill Cotter’s The Splendid Ticket is a bighearted novel of Texas proportions, a delirious, exhilarating ride through the dark corners of the soul and the profound resiliency of the human spirit, masterfully animated through one eccentric family’s experience and all of the tragedy and life and good fortune that they encounter along the way. Read it―and you’ll be sad when the ride is over.”
—S. Kirk Walsh, author of The Elephant of Belfast

“Like all works of fiction that are worth adoring, The Splendid Ticket, given its premise, has no business succeeding, yet wildy succeeds. It’s a fairytale noir and a work of realism. It’s the story of a loving, unhappy family. Novels this tightly rendered and sharp are hardly ever so human, hardly ever this warm. Bill Cotter’s outdone himself.”
—Adam Levin, author of The Instructions

“I could go on about Bill Cotter’s dark humor and wily sentences and his sharp, skewed vision, but The Splendid Ticket is more than the sum of its brilliant parts. Cotter is a singular artist, ruthless and tender and very funny, and his scarred characters, ever gambling on life with the odds stacked against them, won my heart.”
—Karen Olsson, author of The Weil Conjectures