At first we follow three main characters, each of whom hands us off at various points to other people. Henry is a homeless man sleeping in an underpass. He tries to get a first class train to Glasgow but is spotted by police officer Luke, who has been falling out of love with his husband for a while now, ever since their attempt to use a woman as a surrogate fell through. The mother kept her daughter, and the court hasn’t ordered contact despite Luke being the biological father.
Emma is a neglected nine-year-old girl, forced to sleep in a car when mum has a guest over. When she finds the money, her imaginary friend Rachel, an emancipated child from a tv show, encourages her to walk to a toy shop. Emma picks out some nice toys but on the way to the till is stopped by Keith, a sadistic security guard who wants her money and will enjoy hurting her to get it. Ignoring Rachel’s advice, she gets in his van.
Pete Harding works for a particularly nasty criminal, Mickey, who runs their tower block with an iron fist and no velvet glove. On suitcase morning, Pete wakes up to find himself in bed with Mickey’s sister. His attempts to get out run afoul of Mickey’s plan to get every suitcase in the tower block into his own hands. For me this was the most memorable aspect of the book: a gang of criminals breaking into dozens of homes, utterly unafraid of the consequences.
I bought Millionaires Day (the absence of an apostrophe is correct) because it was nominated for best novella in the British Fantasy Awards 2025. Although I was only its fourteenth reader on Goodreads, it’s easy to see why it was nominated: though I love the BFAs dearly, they do have a tendency to be local awards for local people, and the author is a popular chap, writing for Ginger Nuts of Horror, which gets nominated for best magazine/periodical in the same awards almost every year despite being neither a magazine nor a periodical.
But for me there wasn’t much to get excited about here. The writing is okay, and the villains are nasty enough to give the book some appeal to horror fans. But for a fantasy fan there was little of interest. The suitcases’ origins are never explored or explained, so for all we know nothing fantastical happened in the book at all, other than an unusually thick mist and a couple of odd sections later on suggesting (again without explanation) that the imaginary friend might be real.
There is nobody in the story who puts their foot on the ball and tries to think it through. Compare it to The Measure by Nikki Erlick, which has a similar premise – everyone over a certain age receives a piece of string in a box – but explores it thoroughly and methodically. In contrast, this book covers just the first few hours after the event. The real-time progression of the story is well orchestrated, but we see nothing but the street-level response.
Seeing events from various points of view produces some good moments, but often feels quite artificial, for example the overly mechanistic sections from a dog’s point of view, or when we meet Billy, a key member of Mickey’s gang. Narrative withholding can be a useful device, but after seeing Billy from three different points of view it starts to seem unlikely that none of them mentions whether Billy is male or female.
For me, it’s a book that wastes an promising premise on a gangster runaround. How would randomly giving lots of people a million pounds change society? Would the money retain its value or would such a huge influx of cash lead to a devaluation of the pound? Was the money taken from somewhere or was it magically created? You won’t find out from this book – though, to be fair, given that this is just a novella (albeit quite a long one) perhaps such questions were deliberately set aside for a sequel. **
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