Publication Date: March 12, 2024
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 delves heavily into the universal wondering of “What if” and “If only.” The Inheritance follows two central characters as they struggle with this and the aftermath of their individual decisions to pursue an inheritance that shifts how they live in the present.
Virginia has caught the eye of many-a-man in her sixty-plus years. She doesn’t intend to be faced with life-altering consequences as she lives her life boldly. But as the book opens, she may very well be at the end of the road. She is left for dead after a rape. Where did she go wrong? Where did the years go as she fought for an inheritance she believed her daughter deserved, even if that birth came out of an affair?
Arden is the daughter whose childhood was consumed with her mother’s continual petitions and appeals to the Surrogate’s Court to prove she was a descendant of a wealthy man, all before the use of DNA. But now, Arden is a mother of three who has been left with a massive amount of debt when her husband dies suddenly.
When an opportunity arrives to possibly use DNA evidence, will Arden risk losing years as a present mother to the lull of a fortune that she may never actually claim?
I appreciated the author’s approach to having each woman reach several proverbial forks in the road filled with challenges women face each day, not just in an extraordinary situation of reaching for a million dollars.
The Inheritance gives the reader a chance to ponder the value of mindfully living in the moment vis-a-vis waiting on an uncertain promise of a wealthy future. 
Joanna Goodman is the author of the bestselling novels The Forgotten Daughter, The Home for Unwanted Girls, and The Finishing School. Originally from Montreal, she now lives in Toronto with her husband and two children.
