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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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Teenagers in Love: The Virgins by Pamela Erens and This Beautiful by Judy Chicurel

30/10/2014

10 Comments

 
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Segueing neatly from my last post featuring my late-adolescent hairstyles, I’m sharing my experiences of two novels about 17/18-year-olds at different ends of the 1970s, both of which puzzled me until they blossomed into something surprisingly deep and moving with the concluding chapters.

All eyes are on Aviva Rossner as she arrives at the prestigious Auburn Academy in the late 1970s exuding glamour and youthful sexuality. Bruce Bennett-Jones is mortified when she snubs his feeble advances and takes up with the unlikely Seung Jung. The couple flaunt their relationship, evoking the envy and fascination of their classmates and irritation among their teachers: this is a fictional school where rules may be broken but not in such a blatant manner. But underneath the veneer of almost-adult confidence, the pair are struggling. Aviva, in love with being loved, is terrified of the loss of control that could come with indulging her appetites; Seung, gentle and caring, can’t understand her reluctance to join him in his experiments with drugs. But it’s sex that proves their downfall: as every fumbling attempt ends in failure, they blame themselves, and the stakes are heightened for their next encounter.


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Spoofed or spooked by a bad hair day

27/10/2014

17 Comments

 
I do hallucinations, but I don’t do the supernatural. I don’t do memoir, apart from when I do. But I’m very fond of Lisa Reiter of Bite-Size Memoir and Charli Mills of the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge, and it’s been one of my slightly bonkers blogging goals to concoct a dual response to their imaginative prompts, not just in a single post, but in a single flash. I’m also somewhat partial to spoof horror movies like Young Frankenstein and Shaun of the Dead, but I’m not confident I could pull off something along those lines myself.
As my blog is due a break from serious reviews of serious novels, I took these ingredients with me on my walk yesterday in Jane Eyre territory ...

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17 Comments

It Starts with a Letter: Mrs Sinclair’s Suitcase and The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle

24/10/2014

12 Comments

 
My Dear Readers,
I know that a novel written in the form of letters is known as an epistolary novel, but is there a word for a novel that starts with an intriguing letter and then goes on to portray the lives of the letter writer and its intended recipient? I’m asking because two novels I read recently followed that format and I’d like to tell you a little about them.
I’d love to hear your views and, if you do wish to reply, you can do so in the comments box below.
With all best wishes,
Annecdotist.
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Surely this is every book lover’s dream? Roberta works in one of those idyllic old-fashioned bookshops owned, not by some faceless conglomerate, but by a true aficionado of the printed word, the laid-back Philip Old. She rearranges the shelves, serves the occasional customer, dust books, and collects the letters, postcards and till receipts she finds between the pages. These serve as epigraphs for the chapters comprising the contemporary strand of the novel.

The first is a letter from Jan Pietrykowski, written in 1941, ending his relationship with Dorothea because he disapproves of something she’s done. Roberta has found this letter in an old suitcase belonging to her hundred-and-ten-year-old grandmother, Dorothea, now residing in a nursing home. She’s never heard of Mrs D Sinclair, whose name is inscribed in the suitcase, but Jan Pietrykowski is her paternal grandfather, dead before Roberta’s father was born. Otherwise the letter makes little sense to the reader, or to Roberta, especially as it contradicts what she’s been told about the family narrative. It takes the rest of the novel for her to come anywhere near to approaching the truth.


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9 fictional psychologists and psychological therapists: 9. The Delivery Room by Sylvia Brownrigg

20/10/2014

6 Comments

 
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The delivery room is the moniker Mira Braverman‘s husband, Peter, ascribes to the office in their North London flat from which she operates her psychotherapy practice. Over a period of just over a year, the reader bears vicarious witness to the trials and tribulations of her patients while Mira struggles to prevent her own pain intruding upon the therapeutic hour.

This is a beautiful novel about what it is to be human: about birth and death; grief and yearning; and the boundaries between public and private. It’s about conflict, from minor misunderstandings to the fragmentation of nations and all-out war. It’s about national identity, about insiders and outsiders and the risks entailed in genuinely getting to know another human being. Like therapy itself, it’s a gentle novel woven with textured detail, absorbing and gripping while proceeding patiently, eschewing formulaic tropes and attention-grabbing gimmicks, towards some deeper truth.

The narrative progresses from multiple points of view. Although, at least initially, I balked at the head hopping, it’s successful in both adding layers of nuance to the story and in highlighting one of the most interesting aspects of the therapeutic relationship. Each of Mira’s patients meets a plump woman in late middle age with an Eastern European accent, but what they make of this varies with their own personalities and needs. One perceives her as maternal; another sees a Russian or Czech intellectual; the one who comes closest to seeing her as she really is snipes at her for being a Serbian at the time of the Balkan conflict. Yet there’s a touch of humour in their different assumptions about the abstract painting hanging on her wall.


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Coming of age in a concentration camp: The Visitors by Rebecca Mascull and The Undesirables by Dave Boling

17/10/2014

10 Comments

 
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In reviewing Peter Matthiessen’s novel In Paradise, I referred to our collective responsibility to bear witness to the Nazi death camps. Yet in focusing on the Second World War, it’s easy to overlook the fact that the first concentration camps weren’t the brainchild of Hitler, but constructed by the British in South Africa during the second Boer War. When British troops destroyed the farms of the Dutch settlers, ostensibly because they were providing supplies to the command of fighters – much as the Nazis did to the Russian peasants as illustrated in Audrey Magee’s debut novel, The Undertaking – women and children were forced into refugee camps where rations were meagre and infectious diseases rife. This shameful episode of British history is explored in two novels published earlier this year.

The Visitors is a coming-of-age story that begins on a hop farm in late Victorian England. Liza, deaf-blind from the age of two, is like a wild animal until Lottie, through laborious hand signing, gives her the gift of language. Travelling to the oyster farms of the Kent coast as a child, and to South Africa as a young woman, Liza learns about first love and the limits and compensations of her disability. Since infancy, she has communicated with ghosts in her head; through them she finds a way of saving those who have saved her.

While I enjoyed this novel, I had a sense that it was trying to cover too much, and I found Liza’s character most interesting when she was locked into her own world, raising questions about what it means to be without language, what makes us human. But it was heartening – in contrast to those novels depicting duplicitous female friendship – to spend time in the company of strong female characters who were prepared to travel great distances to support each other and those they loved. In both style and its attention to historical detail in the lives of ordinary people, Rebecca Mascull’s debut novel was reminiscent of the work of Tracy Chevalier, making her a writer to watch for the future. 


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Obedience Revisited: The Undertaking by Audrey Magee

14/10/2014

6 Comments

 
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One of the most popular posts on Annecdotal over the last six months was my review of The Good Children by Roopa Farooki. The theme of the novel, which evoked a lively discussion, is the downside of obedience to authority as exposed by Stanley Milgram’s research. In a series of psychological experiments, members of the public showed themselves willing to give painful and damaging electric shocks to another volunteer if asked to do so by an authority figure. This research arose from the attempt to understand the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. In her Bailey’s prize shortlisted debut, The Undertaking, Audrey Magee further illuminates this theme through the marriage of Peter Faber, an ordinary German soldier, and an ambitious young woman, Katharina Spinell.

The traditional Pakistani arranged marriage which Natasha Ahmed flagged up in the comments on my post seems almost romantic relative to Peter and Katharina’s union, motivated by his desire for leave from the front and hers for the hope of leaving home and a secure pension should her husband die in service. Yet love blossoms against the odds and it’s only the thought of his wife that sustains Peter through the ill-conceived midwinter assault on Stalingrad. She, meanwhile, in conjunction with her acquisitive mother and excessively compliant father, is helping herself to the luxuries left behind in Berlin by the deported Jews.


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Lovely, Versatile, Inspired and Inspiring: Some Blog Awards and Breaking News about My Writing

10/10/2014

38 Comments

 
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Six months ago, I was so excited to receive my first blog award, I spread my response across three separate posts. Little did I know back then that the seemingly innocuous Liebster could herald my co-option into a coven of bloggers whose every keystroke would be sacrificed to the beast that resides on many a sidebar, gobbling up batch after batch of interesting/amusing facts about the blogger and sending said blogger wandering lonely through the blogosphere to recruit another fifteen initiates to the fold.  

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The fear of losing Annecdotal to the swamp of award-dom, led me to renege on my blogigations, failing to complete my versatile nominations or respond to a third Liebster – no, I can’t remember where the second came from, but I know it existed  – or display the badge for a very inspiring  or a double one lovely, never mind honour the four nominations for various versions of the my writing process blog hop. My guilt was mounting until I witnessed the endorsement of Paula Reed Nancarrow’s post on breaking the chain of blog awards as well as her witty follow-up on ten reasons to decline. Could it be that in my tiny corner of cyberspace, the beast had been sated, that blog awards were now passé?


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Ghostly Girls: Zebra Crossing by Meg Vandermerwe and The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

6/10/2014

4 Comments

 
I do enjoy exploring unexpected links between the novels I’ve been reading. A gritty story of the real-life dangers faced by illegal immigrants on the streets of contemporary Cape Town seems a world away from the remote homestead in 1920s Alaska in which Eowyn Ivey’s modern fairytale is set. Yet, apart from being debut novels and the happenstance of my reading them in sequence, both are stories of survival with an unusually pale-skinned girl at their hearts. In addition, The Snow Child also gives me an opportunity to acknowledge the writing of a couple of other bloggers whose support I cherish, while Zebra Crossing has served as the inspiration for my response to Charli Mills’s latest flash fiction challenge.

It’s some years now since I had any interest in holidaying abroad – or venturing on holiday at all, if I’m entirely honest – and my last trip outside Europe could well be part of the reason. This was a fascinating botanical tour of Madagascar but, because we were focused on the flora, our interactions with the local people were somewhat limited and often unsettling to my woolly-liberal constitution. I wrote about this in my post On Memory and Imagination on the publication of my short story, Silver Bangles, a fictionalised account of an incident on that trip that brought the disparities in wealth between the locals and the tourists into sharp relief. A similar encounter provided the material (if that doesn’t sound too disrespectful) for my water-themed flash. But a third uncomfortable event from that holiday – in which I dithered about donating my sunscreen lotion to a family with albinism seen from the comfort of our bus in a remote village – hasn’t yet made it into my fiction. 

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How to live after survival? The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

2/10/2014

16 Comments

 
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Around the sixtieth anniversary of the ending of the Second World War, there were whispers in the media about old men being traumatised by the memories of the horrors of their youth that were triggered by the worldwide commemorations. As a psychologist, I’d long been interested in repressed memories and, as the offspring of a World War II veteran, I was curious about the impact on my generation, one of the themes I wanted to address in my novel, Sugar and Snails. So my ears pricked up when, earlier this summer, I caught a BBC radio broadcast about a novel exploring one of the greatest atrocities of that war by a man whose father had survived it. I liked the way Richard Flanagan refused to provide easy answers: he’d spent twelve years trying to understand what evil was but ended up no wiser. I strongly recommend you listen to his interview with Mariella Frostrup – it starts about two minutes into the broadcast and lasts about 10 to 12 minutes – who does a much better job at selling the novel than I can. But I’ll give it my best shot … 


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    OUT NOW: The poignant prequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home
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    Fictional therapists
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    About Anne Goodwin
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    My published books
    entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice
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    My latest novel, published May 2021
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    My debut novel shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize
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    My second novel published May 2017.
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    Short stories on the theme of identity published 2018
    Anne Goodwin's books on Goodreads
    Sugar and Snails Sugar and Snails
    reviews: 32
    ratings: 52 (avg rating 4.21)

    Underneath Underneath
    reviews: 24
    ratings: 60 (avg rating 3.17)

    Becoming Someone Becoming Someone
    reviews: 8
    ratings: 9 (avg rating 4.56)

    GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Issue 4 GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Issue 4
    reviews: 4
    ratings: 9 (avg rating 4.44)

    The Best of Fiction on the Web The Best of Fiction on the Web
    reviews: 3
    ratings: 3 (avg rating 4.67)

    2022 Reading Challenge

    2022 Reading Challenge
    Anne has read 2 books toward their goal of 100 books.
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    Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.  
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