From the bestselling author of The Home for Unwanted Girls and The Forgotten Daughter comes a compulsively readable mother-daughter story in which two women who share a difficult past must come to together to claim the future they deserve.

Arden Moore enjoyed an affluent life thanks to her husband’s high-paying job. But a year after his death, the 36-year-old is a grieving single mother deeply in debt and living paycheck to paycheck with her three children. Then an unexpected call from a well-known estate lawyer in New York offers a glimmer of hope. It is the beginning of a complex legal journey that could mean the difference between a life of abject poverty and unthinkable wealth thanks to her father, deceased billionaire Wallace Barclay.

Thirty years before, Arden’s mother Virginia Bunt, a flirtatious love addict with a string of failed affairs, met Wallace, an encounter that transformed her life. When he died unexpectedly without a will, Virginia fought to secure a comfortable future for her and the secret unborn daughter she shared with Wallace. Yet despite her best efforts, society and the legal system prevented her from receiving the money that should rightfully have been hers. Now, though, with changes in the legal system and science, her daughter Arden may finally succeed in claiming the inheritance that has been long denied.

Told from both Arden and Virginia’s viewpoints, straddling past and present, and moving from Toronto to New York City, The Inheritance is a poignant portrait of familial bonds, haunting pasts, the collateral damage of life choices, and the promise of hopeful futures as two venerable women fight for the life they deserve.

Joanna Goodman's stories have appeared in B & A Fiction, Event, The New Quarterly and The White Wall Review. In 1996 Joanna Goodman was a winner in the Canadian Author's Association Short Fiction Contest. At one time she worked as a journalist for Reuters in Ottawa, and her day job now is co-owner (with her mother) of a bed linen store, Au Lit linens, in Toronto. Since Belle of the Bayou she has written two more novels, You Made Me Love You and Harmony.

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“In this captivating story layered with love, suspense, grief, and redemption, Goodman once again creates intriguing characters that will immediately draw readers in.” — Booklist on The Forgotten Daughter

“Resonant and relevant. . . . The characters, complex and flawed, love and fight so fiercely that it’s hard not to be drawn into their passionate orbits and to feel, even slightly, a glimmer of hope as they refuse to give up on the ideal of happiness.” — Kirkus on The Forgotten Daughter

"A heart-wrenching saga of love and loss that's not to be missed." — Toronto Star on The Home for Unwanted Girls