What would you do if you won £33,000,000? Buy a stately home? Become a celebrity? Give it to charity? And what would the consequences be?
This is the story of the O'Leary family, comprising hyperactive mother Lorraine, Lottery winning daughter Maxine, and high-spending twin sister Suzanne. Add in Maxine's tough-minded ten-year-old daughter Joely, and the shady Luke Livingstone, Maxine's new secretary, and the scene is set for family relationships to warp under the pressure of sudden, vast wealth. The various characters narrate their own unreliable accounts of what happens next in a darkly comic fable. Lorraine buys a delapidated stately home, Lyle Hall, Suzanne wages a campaign to become a celebrity, Luke waits to steal the money, and Maxine, who wants the win to do good in the world, hesitates.
As Christmas at Lyle Hall approaches, almost a year after the win, Maxine and Suzanne's relationship has plummeted. Luke has tired of waiting for Maxine to pay the money into a charity account which he can then empty, and has begun to plan her death. But Maxine, meanwhile, has been making plans of her own - decisions which will destroy the family's ambitions and change their futures irrevocably.