The Hundredth Chance

Maud Brian has spent her entire life as caretaker to her younger brother Bunny, whose crippling injury in infancy left him dependent on her. Now their finances have collapsed, and their mother is remarrying a man Maud despises, a coarse self-made businessman who represents everything she resents about the world. Into this strained household rides Jake Bolton, a horse trainer whose rough honesty and unconventional worldview begin to crack open Maud's carefully constructed sense of duty. She has built her identity around sacrifice, around being needed, around the moral certainty that her lot is to suffer and serve. But what happens when love arrives not as rescue, but as threat to everything she's believed about herself? Ethel M. Dell, whose novels dominated the early 20th-century bestseller lists, crafts a story about the terrifying possibility of happiness for women taught to believe they deserve none. The hundredth chance isn't about luck. It's about whether Maud can allow herself to want anything at all.