Me, Dingo and Sibelius - Joy Wodhams

Charlie Churchill is the odd one out, the ugly duckling in a dysfunctional all-female Liverpool family. She's the one who works a forty hour week, pays the bills and provides a modicum of common sense, plus - when she has time - a healthy cooked meal to balance the takeaways and ready meals the others thrive on. She's the one who looks like her deceased Dad, while Georgie and her illegitimate daughter Rosie (father the elusive Arsehole Alan) look like Mum. Slim, blonde, leggy and beautiful. It's too soon to tell with Georgie's baby Daisy (also illegitimate, father unknown but the consequence of a night's clubbing). Daisy, still bald-headed, currently resembles Harry Hill without the specs but will no doubt metamorphose into yet another blonde Churchill beauty. Charlie's escape from the shadow of her family is the Sundowners Retirement Home, where she has worked for the past five years as a lowly carer. Here, surrounded by her 'wrinklies' as Georgie calls them, she can forget her daily concerns: the fact that her life is going nowhere, that she's still a virgin at thirty-two, that there's no likelihood of ever finding a husband or having a family of her own, that she's insufficiently educated or qualified to climb the ladder of success. But when Dingo, her favourite resident, dies and leaves her a fortune, her life changes dramatically. How she copes with becoming a millionaire and carrying out his last wishes against a background of suspicion, envy, hostility and eventually a tragedy, is the theme of this novel.