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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Halfway to my official target, I’m below where I thought I’d be

30/6/2021

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Reading isn’t a race, but when Goodreads invites me to set myself a target, and offers to monitor my progress, I’m happy to join in. For the past few years, I’ve aimed for 100 books, smugly confident I’ll sail across the finishing line before the trees shed their leaves. But not this year. Based on my stats so far, I’ll be lucky to reach my centenary by Christmas.

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Forced migrations: Moth & American Dirt

22/6/2021

8 Comments

Here are two novels about forced migrations and which focus on structural inequalities and the particular dangers to women and girls. The first is about the partition of India in the mid-1940s and the second a contemporary novel set in the Americas.

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Novel perspectives on 20th-century fascism: Tonight Is Already Tomorrow & Widowland

12/6/2021

4 Comments

Both these novels address mid-20th-century fascism from unusual angles: the first through the preoccupations of a Jewish family in Mussolini’s Italy; the second through an alternative history in which Britain, instead of going to war against the Nazis, has succumbed to colonisation in everything but name.

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Women’s historical oppression: The Pull of the Stars & The Spinning House Affair

5/6/2021

10 Comments

These two historical novels, set near the dawn of the twentieth century, illustrate how appallingly women’s freedoms, even – or especially – over custody of their own bodies, have been controlled by men. Both stories take place in or around institutions: the first an Irish hospital battling the pandemic; the second a university battling the ordinary citizens of an English town.