Book info

• Title The Man Who Won
• Author Guy Bellamy
• Year 2005
• Genre Humour

For writer Andy Devlin life has always been a struggle. But when his debts spiral out of control and he's forced to sell his home to pay them off, he finds himself unable to afford a new place to live. By a malign quirk of fate, calamity strikes his two closest friends at the same time; Clive Preston is facing professional oblivion, and Brad Rowe's public relations agency is killed off by an unsympathetic bank. For the first time the three friends are split up. That is, until Brad has a dramatic change of fortune and sets about buying a luxurious new home in the country for a neighbourly reunion. But his astonishing act of generosity will create more problems than it solves...

Thoughts

Quite a simple tale, this, the moral of the story being that just because you win the Lottery, doesn’t mean all your dreams will come true. The story revolves around three friends who are struggling for money, until one of them wins the Lottery, becomes a multi-millionaire, and generously shares the wealth.

Gradually, the relationships between friends, and wives, disintegrates, and it’s an interesting study of exactly how things can go wrong no matter how much money you have in the bank. It also strikes me as a tale that advocates keeping busy and working, as there’s a streak of sanity in the only members of the group who get themselves hobbies or remain working despite the windfall.

Most of the characters aren’t all that sympathetic, but the story flows well from one to the other with some good dialogue in between. A quick read, and interesting, but probably not hugely memorable.

Rating: 3 / 5