BUY ME LOVE

In Brooklyn, New York, in 2005, Ellen Portinari buys a lottery ticket on a whim; not long after, she realizes she's won a hundred-million-dollar jackpot. With a month to redeem the ticket, she tells no one but her alcoholic brother - a talented composer whose girlfriend has died in a terrorist attack abroad - about her preposterous good luck.

As the clock ticks, Ellen caroms from incredulity to giddiness to dread as she tries to reckon with the potential consequences of her win. She becomes unexpectedly involved with a man and boy she's met at her local gym. While she grapples with the burden of secret-keeping and the tug of a new intimacy, a Brooklyn street artist named Blair Talpa is contending with her own challenges: a missing brother, an urge to make art that will derange orbits," and a lack of money.

En route to redeem the lottery ticket, Ellen finds her prospects entwining by chance with Blair's -- which allows Ellen to reimagine luck's relation to loss, and the reader to revel in surprise.

Martha Cooley is the author of two novels - The Archivist, a national bestseller also published in a dozen foreign markets, and Thirty-Three Swoons - and a memoir, Guesswork. She co-translated Antonio Tabucchi's story collection Time Ages in a Hurry. Her essays, short fiction, and co-translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and numerous leading literary journals. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing at Adelphi University, where she is a Professor of English.