The Splendid Ticket

by Bill Cotter

Overview

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..

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781952119491
Publisher:	McSweeney's Publishing
Publication date:	12/06/2022
Pages:	303
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Bill Cotter is the author of the novels Fever Chart and The Parallel Apartments, both published by McSweeney's. He is also responsible for the middle-grade adventure series Saint Philomene's Infirmary for Magical Creatures, penned under the name W. Stone Cotter, and published by Macmillan. Cotter's short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Electric Literature, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. An essay, "The Gentleman's Library," was awarded a Pushcart Prize. When he is not writing, Cotter labors in the antiquarian book trade.

Editorial Reviews

08/08/2022

Cotter (The Parallel Apartments) showcases in his colorful if overstuffed latest his knack for crafting unusual characters, as well as his penchant for superfluous plot threads. In 2012, middle-aged Texan Angie Grandet wins a $324 million lottery jackpot, and she decides to split the windfall down the middle with her estranged husband, Dean Lee, a compulsive gambler. From here, Cotter rewinds to when Angie and Dean Lee met in 1997; the birth of the couple’s two daughters, Nadine and Sophie; the handgun accident that kills Sophie at age four, which sends six-year-old Nadine into a spiral of depression; and the family’s slow disintegration. Back in the present, Angie and Dean Lee move with 14-year-old Nadine to a mansion in Austin and hope their newfound wealth will heal their emotional wounds. Tucked within these episodes are smart details, like Dean Lee’s penchant for Latin American literature, which he developed as a teen while reading Bolaño and Borges in Spanish to a blind neighbor, yet Cotter also punctuates the novel with characters who don’t serve much of a purpose, such as Foster, the boyfriend of Angie’s mom who lusts after Angie, only to vanish shortly after appearing. Though certain elements stall out, there’s much to admire in Cotter’s story of rebirth and fate. Agent: Adam Eaglin, Cheney Agency. (Oct.)

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.”
—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

From the Publisher