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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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Fictional psychologists and psychotherapists: 22. Last Night on Earth by Kevin Maher

31/12/2015

2 Comments

 
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Remember the eve of the millennium? When we thought planes might drop from the sky because computers couldn’t cope with a string of three zeros? I even wrote a short story about it (In the Interim). Well here’s a novel set at that very time.

Over budget on his film on the
millennium dome, failing to keep his feelings of loss at bay despite regular doses of cocaine, and with the Catholic hierarchy back in Ireland hoping to cash in on his mother’s claim that he’s Jesus Christ, it’s little wonder that Jay sees the final day of 1999 as potentially the last night on earth. But I’m getting ahead of myself …


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2015: My Reading and Blogging Year

28/12/2015

16 Comments

 
Last year, I set out to read 60 books and read 96. This year, I set a target of 100 books, and read 120. This suggests I’m reading more each year and making more accurate predictions. Of course, it’s not a competition, even against myself, but I do like figures. And, daft as it seems, I do like producing an annual report!

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A Year of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman and The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson

27/12/2015

6 Comments

 
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I was a little surprised to find that Marvellous Ways is a character, rather than a method, in Sarah Winman’s second novel but, as she reviews her long life in the company of a bereft young soldier, it turns out that a life lived according to her own ways is rather marvellous after all. Aged eighty-nine when we first meet her in 1947, her years have passed mostly alone in a remote Cornish creek. Her mother, she’s been told, was a mermaid and her father found a place “between God and medicine” in administering to the dying in their final hours, perhaps a precursor to the hospice movement featured in a couple of other novels. Marvellous finds a role for herself at the other end of life, as a very different kind of midwife to Gugu in Mo Yan’s Frog.


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Christmas chills: Time of the Beast by Geoff Smith and Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray

24/12/2015

11 Comments

 
As Christmas Eve is the traditional time for ghost stories and the Gothic, so today’s the day to share a couple of my recent reads to have you scared to go to bed.

It’s the year 666, and Britain is a battleground; not only warlords fighting for territory but shamans and priests at loggerheads over people’s minds. After daring to challenge the views of his abbot, Athwold, a young monk, opts to become a hermit in the misty swamps of the Fenlands, in an attempt to reconcile himself to his own truth. But this isn’t a story of spiritual seclusion (as in The Anchoress) as his exposure to a scene of horrific demonic carnage (possibly a hallucination brought on by eating mouldy bread) moves him to join the itinerant monk, Cadroc, on the quest to root out the evil once and for all. Here Athwold finds his faith continually tested, as his mind becomes a battleground between rationality and superstition. Are these killers mythical monsters or merely men gone mad? Whose talisman has the power to defeat them, the pagan or the Roman church?

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Conditional love: Wolf, Wolf by Eben Venter

22/12/2015

8 Comments

 
Thirty-something Mattheus Duiker exists in an extended adolescence, his four years overseas having been financed by his father, he’s hoping for a comparable gesture to realise his dream of opening a takeaway serving healthy food to the ordinary workers of Cape Town. As he nurses his father through his final months of cancer, Mattie looks forward to the day when the four-bedroom luxury house, in an area patrolled by security guards round the clock, will be his and, perhaps, his boyfriend Jack’s.
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What kind of light do you shine?

21/12/2015

13 Comments

 
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These dark mornings, Mr A often finds me pottering about the house in the dark. “Why don’t you turn on the light?” he says. I shrug, but of course he can’t see me. “I like the dark.” In the safety and familiarity of my home, I prefer to wait for the natural light to seep in gradually through the windows, rather than with a sudden burst of artificial light. Of course, it’s never completely dark in a town with a streetlight at the end of the garden and, if I’m at the computer, it emits light of its own. But, within these wishy-washy constraints, I cling on to what passes for darkness as long as I can.

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Rewriting the history of the Wild West: Beyond the Horizon by Ryan Ireland

18/12/2015

20 Comments

 

After a boyhood at sea amongst drunks and cannibals, the man sets off across the empty plains of North America, navigating by the stars. When his wagon bursts its axle, he decides the place he’s got to is as good as anywhere to settle and, when a passing band of Mexicans sell him a pregnant woman in exchange for coffee, his simple life seems complete. But then the stranger arrives out of nowhere and, despite warnings from the woman in a language the man can’t understand, sends him on a fool’s errand to register his makeshift family at the mythical Fort James.


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The violence behind the beauty: The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James & Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy

16/12/2015

5 Comments

 
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Emma and her friend Teddy are Americans visiting a forest reserve in southern India, to make a wildlife documentary about an innovative method of reuniting lost or injured baby elephants with their mothers. Manu, the younger son of a rice farmer, is drawn into the alluring world of ivory hunting following the death of his cousin by a rogue elephant. After being orphaned by poachers and kept in captivity and worked as a temple elephant, the Gravedigger has escaped his chains and is causing havoc in the villages on the edge of the forest. Through these three strands, Tania James tells an engaging and moving story of the conflicting interests in nature conservation. It’s testament to her talent as a writer that it is possible to feel sympathy for each of the flawed characters in this novel, even when none of them come out particularly well – except maybe the elephant who is, after all, just being an elephant.


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Psychologists Write: Stuart Larner

14/12/2015

24 Comments

 
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What kind of psychologist are you?
I am a retired chartered clinical psychologist.
I worked in a general hospital in the UK with people who had difficulty coping with disability and physical illness. I devised a method of assessment based on the seven psychological tasks such patients face. These are: understanding and managing symptoms, dealing with the medical procedures, relating to hospital staff, managing upsetting feelings, maintaining a competent self-image, maintaining relationships with friends and family, and preparing for the future. I helped the multidisciplinary team in a physical health setting to understand the illness from the patients’ point of view, and what action might help all concerned. I took on a selected number of patients directly for psychological therapy along cognitive-behavioural lines.
I am also interested in applying psychology to my own life, and have kept up a self-monitoring diary for smoking, drinking, and exercise. As a result, I gave up smoking on July 4th 1984. I’ve not touched the weed since. I also applied some principles of sport psychology to help me play better cricket. However my progress was limited by my sporting ability, not by my psychology.


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A Life in the Day: Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhari

13/12/2015

6 Comments

 
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It’s August 1985, and Ananda, a student of English at the University of Central London with aspirations to be a poet, has a whole day to fill. We follow him reluctantly get out of bed, fret about the neighbours’ noise, miss his mother who has recently returned to Bombay, attend a meeting with his tutor, and hang out with his equally eccentric uncle, Rangamama, as they separately reminisce and bicker about their lives. Their territory is Bloomsbury, Hampstead and Belsize Park, a world of disappointing Indian restaurants, public transport, and potentially racist drunks. Inveterate outsiders, not just in London but in Asia, too: their Sylheti Hindu heritage having been twice rebranded (first with Partition, then with Bangladeshi independence) and leaving a legacy of “Indian” restaurants and the revered poet, Tagore. Desperately unhappy, the two men cling to each other despite their differences, Ananda possibly seeing his empty future in his uncle.

It’s hard to know what to make of a novel comprised of all the minute quotidian detail that most novels would cut out. There are touches of humour, and I especially enjoyed this exposition on the lack of reference to lavatorial necessities in Western film and literature (p128-9):


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Fictional psychologists and psychotherapists: 21. Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

12/12/2015

8 Comments

 
Anna Bentz, an American in her late 30s, has moved to Zürich for the sake of her husband’s career. Bruno, a banker, is happy to settle back into the very suburb where he grew up, with his mother just around the corner. Three children later, Anna is highly dependent upon Ursula, although her mother-in-law could never be regarded as a friend. Treasuring solitude, Anna isn’t particularly skilled at friendship. Which is a problem, as she is desperately in need of a confidante. Her husband is emotionally unavailable. She loves her children but finds mothering a bore. Without a job, without even a driving licence or her own bank account, and inarticulate in Schwüzerdütsch, Anna feels alienated from her adopted country (p10):
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Looking at difference, embracing diversity

11/12/2015

13 Comments

 
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As I rarely, if ever, watch sport, I was surprised how involved I got in the London Olympics. How could I not be moved by such a display of determination and athleticism? But it was the Paralympics I enjoyed the most (despite the slightly inferior TV coverage). Alongside the awe at the athletes’ prowess, were the stories, implicit or explicit, of adversity overcome. On top of that, the games afforded a rare opportunity to look properly at disabled bodies and, with the somewhat complex rating system, to be curious about them without fear of causing offence.


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Only We Know by Karen Perry sparks some musings on genre

9/12/2015

4 Comments

 
Three children on a camping trip in Kenya meet another two little girls on the banks of a river. Mixing friendship and competition, as well as an unacknowledged rage, they devise a game that ends with a scream. The mothers come running and, while it might not be entirely clear how the tragedy occurred, one mother is adamant that her boys, Nick and Luke, along with Katie, the daughter of her best friend, must guard the shocking secret from the world. Thirty years later, Nick and Katie meet again back in Dublin, following Luke’s sudden disappearance. Over the next few weeks, they’re forced to confront their memories of their childhood trauma, and the damage the cover-up has caused.

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On pop, pirates and plagiarism

7/12/2015

26 Comments

 
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I recently shared an extract from my next novel, Underneath, in which a little boy is dancing with his mother to Cliff Richard’s Living Doll. The words are taken all too literally by the child who becomes the man who keeps a woman imprisoned in a cellar but I knew, from the very first draft of this novel, to be wary of quoting song lyrics. Yet, in the version I sent my publisher, I’d retained six words that furnished a neat link between past and present, while demonstrating the narrator’s disturbed and disturbing state of mind. But as publishing becomes a (still fairly distant) reality, I thought I’d better get some advice from the Society of Authors on copyright law. Based on what I was told – and this is only my interpretation – I’ve decided to paraphrase instead of quoting: I don’t want to risk having lawyers on my back; nor do I want to renege on my own personal vow never to pay to be published (it’s the author’s, not the publisher’s, responsibility to seek out and pay for permissions).


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The Promised Land: These Are the Names by Tommy Weiringa

5/12/2015

5 Comments

 
Fifteen desperate people hand over their life savings and documentation to the traffickers; they’ve been told they have a better chance of being granted asylum if they arrive with no names. Crouched in a fetid space at the back of a lorry, the sound of barking dogs convinces them they’ve safely crossed the border. Later, the door is opened and they’re told to walk towards the east and safety. But, as their journey stretches from hours to days, as the sun scorches their skin and the rain chews their bones, as they lose track of time along with their identities, they fall one by one by the wayside. When the remaining three men, one woman and a boy arrive on the border town on the steppe, people flee them as if from ghosts. Surely these wild emaciated figures could not be people?
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Let those novels dance!

1/12/2015

10 Comments

 
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I was quick off the mark with the latest Carrot Ranch flash fiction challenge. But, although I was pleased with my toilet dance, I thought it didn’t do justice to the versatility of dance in fiction. So, given that Charli has given us an extra week to submit our stories, and impressed with those I’ve read already, I thought I’d give it another go.

If you could learn to dance from fiction, I’d be able to do the jitterbug after reading Clare Morrall’s novel,
After the Bombing. I’m not sure what kind of dancing they did in 1860s Indiana, but the female soldier, Ash, is full of admiration for her husband’s prowess in Laird Hunt’s Neverhome. In my novel, Sugar and Snails, my narrator dressed up in a borrowed tutu and danced without inhibition as a toddler, but sadly never felt as comfortable in her body again. This flash is for her:


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    Free ebook: click the image to claim yours.
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    OUT NOW: The poignant prequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home
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    Find a review
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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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    Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin: 
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    slug-slayer, tramper of moors, 
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