Paper Fortunes

Based on a true story. A disgraced nurse. A grieving socialite. A mentally challenged young woman. One baby.

Chicago, 1937. The Elizabeth Sullivan Home for Destitute and Degenerate Women is a crumbling Victorian mansion on the city's South Side where women go when they have nowhere else to turn.

Marian Walters arrives at the Home as a disgraced nurse hoping for a fresh start. Instead, she is drawn to Opal Olson, a mentally challenged girl who turns up at the Home unable—or unwilling—to explain who she is or where she came from, carrying only a worn quilt and a small bag of paper fortunes. The more Marian learns about Opal, the more desperate she becomes to discover the girl's secrets while hiding her own. 

Across the city in a Drexel Boulevard mansion, wealthy socialite Evelyn Porter is suffocating beneath her mother's expectations and her own private grief. After a stay at a discreet country sanitarium fails to mend what is broken inside her, Evelyn returns home convinced that one thing alone can save her. But what she quickly learns is that what she wants most in the world may come at a price she never anticipated.

Told in three voices, Paper Fortunes follows three women whose lives are about to collide over a single child—and the paper-thin line between the futures we are handed and the ones we can still rewrite.

Perfect for readers who love historical fiction based on a true story, a class divide between three women, mental health and the asylums of the 1930s, a disgraced heroine's second chance, motherhood and adoption, found family, and workplace romance.

Fans of Lisa Wingate's Before We Were Yours and Kristin Hannah will find a story that stays with them long after the last page.