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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Insect Nation #99WordStories

13/9/2023

6 Comments

 
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The latest flash fiction challenge from the Carrot Ranch is to compose a 99-word story about the insect nation. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it got me thinking about how we humans underestimate the small creatures that live among us – or, perhaps, we live among. I didn’t have a suitable new review to pair my response with, so here’s a quote from a novel I read some time ago about a woman who runs a business resettling, rather than exterminating, household pests.

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6 Comments

Overburdened: The Plimsoll Line, Starling Days, Cat and the Dreamer, Unsettled Ground & Sorrow and Bliss

5/4/2023

8 Comments

 
Five recent reads about characters facing life challenges that are almost too much to bear: bereavement; chronic illness; relationship crises and more. See what you think.
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8 Comments

Poland and Hungary under the Soviet system: The Snow Hare & The Fawn

7/2/2023

4 Comments

 
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches its second year, a couple of recent reads reminds me of how other eastern European countries have suffered under the Soviet regime. These novels are about women’s lives in the late 1940s and early 1950s: the first set in Poland and the second in Hungary. Would you believe that it wasn’t until I came to post this that I realised both titles feature animals that should be in the wild?
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4 Comments

Compassion and cruelty: Feeding Time & The Dolphin House

30/12/2022

8 Comments

 
My final two reviews of 2022 are tenuously linked by being set in closed communities in which unempathic people hold vulnerable creatures in their power. I refer to creatures less because the staff of the nightmare care home in the first novel don’t seem to regard their charges as human and more because the inmates of the second – where the compassion of the lowliest employee almost compensates for the attitude of her senior colleagues – are dolphins.
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8 Comments

What makes Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections my perfect Christmas read?

3/12/2021

8 Comments

 
On Christmas Eve last year, when many were struggling to adapt to a curtailed coronavirus Christmas, I was in my element with a long walk in the Peak District followed by settling down with a mince pie to reread one of my favourite novels. This would be the third time I’d spent the festive season with the Lamberts, and I relished their company as much as the first time I met them in the freshly-published hardback I gifted myself (with money from my mother) almost twenty years before. I love this book at the sentence level, at the level of the eternally disappointed characters, and at the level of the ridiculously sprawling 500-plus page plot.
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8 Comments

War is over, but the trauma endures: Winter Flowers & Transparent City

17/9/2021

6 Comments

 
Allow me to introduce you to two translated novels, set on different continents a century apart, in the aftermath of wars that, for some, will never end. The first is set in contemporary Angola, a country rich in minerals but economically poor, hampered by twenty-five years of civil war; the second takes place in France, at the end of the First World War, a war which will continue to impact on the members of one small family for the rest of their lives.

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6 Comments

Fear of flying?

28/8/2021

10 Comments

 
Pigs will fly before I board a plane again. It’s not that I’m anxious, it’s that - even before the pandemic - long-distance travel no longer felt worth the effort.

Diana, the narrator of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, wasn’t afraid of being airborne either. So why did I send her on a Fear of Flying course? Because, while not averse to flying in a literal sense, she was grounded by inhibition. Fear of intimacy, fear of sex, fear of revealing her true self. When she wouldn’t fly out to Cairo to visit Simon, her friends assumed she was phobic, and clubbed together to pay for her cure.
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10 Comments

Passion and place: Wreaking & A Beast in Paradise

26/4/2021

6 Comments

 
Allow me to introduce two recent reads featuring a teenage girl’s sexual awakening with a physically attractive but morally suspect young man, arousing the envy of her less confident suitor. Both novels also emphasise her passion for the place in which she lives: in the first, a derelict asylum in southern England; in the second, the family farm in rural France.

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6 Comments

Middle-aged woman loses her mojo: Scent & Jumping the Queue

29/3/2021

4 Comments

 
These two novels are about women over forty for whom life has lost its sparkle, partly due to marital infidelity and an empty nest. The first is a nuanced portrayal of contemporary middle age, set in Paris; the second is a shallow glimpse at widowhood and fear of ageing, set in the 1980s on England’s south coast.
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4 Comments

On Beeley Moor

11/2/2021

2 Comments

 
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As you can see from the date, I'm tardy with my response to this extra flash fiction challenge. It might be that, my brain mired in promo land, I'm baffled by the prompt: life as a river of consciousness. It might be that it's meant to be a special tribute to Sue Vincent and I'm scared of messing up. I knew from the start where I wanted to set my 99-word story: although Sue and I have never met off-line, we've shared some physical territory. The problem is, although winter rain has flooded footpaths, there are no rivers up on the Derbyshire moors.

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2 Comments

My reading and writing goals for 2021

11/1/2021

12 Comments

 
Did you ever get the feeling 2021 might not happen? We’d somehow be stuck in a 2020 Groundhog Day? Or were you the opposite, confident a new diary would create this worn-out world anew? Well, here we are, with some things as bad as ever – or worse: in the UK, with the new variant, hospital admissions are higher than during the first lockdown – but with the promise of life edging towards normal sometime this year.
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Meanwhile, we plod on, making the best of what freedom we have. For those of us who live primarily in our heads, the pandemic is no excuse to shirk. So, on the reasonable assumption I’ll survive to implement them, here are my goals and plans for the coming year.

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12 Comments

Uncovering injustice: The Windrush Betrayal & Act of Grace

21/9/2020

4 Comments

 
These two recent reads – the first non-fiction rooted in the UK, the second a novel visiting Australia, the USA and Iraq – involving characters and authors delving into recent and historical government injustice against its colonised peoples. Read, and use your vote accordingly – but of course you already do!

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4 Comments

Caterpillars, Butterflies, Sugar and Snails

20/7/2020

8 Comments

 
Whoever designed[1] butterflies, must’ve been having a laugh. No mere shapeshifters, the creepy crawlers must dissolve completely for their winged alter egos to emerge. No wonder the butterfly is considered a metaphor for transformation. Where else does nature deliver such a dramatic change?
 
Thanks to our gorgeous garden meadows, I can observe this metamorphosis almost at my back door. And it strikes me that it’s an oversimplification to view this as a transition from ugly to beautiful: some of the caterpillars are rather attractive too. Take, for example the brown-and-yellow striped creature that feeds on ragwort, or the bright[2]-eyed elephant hawk moth caterpillar (pictured) that graced our willow herb last year.

[1] Don't mistake me for a Creationist, I mean this metaphorically!
[2] Obviously these aren't its real eyes.

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8 Comments

Supernatural / super-natural: The Rain Heron & Pine

6/7/2020

2 Comments

 
I recently read very different two novels with a supernatural element and a forest setting where nature cannot be ignored. The first is a meditation on our collective fragility involving a fantastic – in the literal sense – bird. The second is a psychological suspense story about a family and community haunted by a young mother’s disappearance a decade before.

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2 Comments

Unrecognised: Rabbits for Food & Miss Iceland

24/4/2020

10 Comments

 
Is there discrimination against women writers? (Is there even more discrimination against older women writers?) Probably but, there being even worse things to get hung up about right now, I’ll gloss over the fact that these two novels about under-appreciated female writers – one in 1960s Iceland, the other in 21st-century New York – come from fairly successful female authors. With a couple of caveats, either or both would make great lockdown reads.

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10 Comments

A perfectly cathartic political satire: Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony (#review and #giveaway)

23/4/2020

49 Comments

 
In those innocent days before Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, Republican Congressman Alexander Wilson might have seemed a cartoon caricature, but I found his fictional hypocrisy and narcissism – and unwarranted optimism – immensely consoling in these rage-inducing times. We join him as the doorbell rings at his comfortable home in Virginia, on a hot day in August at the start of his re-election campaign. He’s surprised at the size of the parcel left by the FedEx delivery driver, and even more so when he unwraps it to find a stuffed aardvark and an unsigned card from his ‘lover’ (Congressman Wilson is incapable of love) Greg Tampico, President of the Namibian charity, The Happiness Foundation.
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49 Comments

Dislocation: The Lost Lights of St Kilda & Gun Island

21/2/2020

10 Comments

 
These two novels feature the displacement of people and the unique cultures and environments they left behind. The first introduces us to the remote Scottish island of St Kilda whose depleted population was evacuated to the mainland in 1930. The second links Venice with the Sunderbans in the Bay of Bengal via folklore and cli-fi. Despite their complementary covers, they’re very different books.

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10 Comments

Survival skills for wintry weather: The Year without Summer & Snow, Dog, Foot

14/2/2020

4 Comments

 
These two recent reads explore physical and psychological survival, or otherwise, in extreme weather conditions. The first is a historical novel about the devastating human, climactic and economic consequences of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. The second is a translated novella about vulnerable hermit overwintering in the Italian Alps. If you choose to read either of these, you won’t be disappointed.

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4 Comments

Slavery’s shadow: A Tall History of Sugar & Tender Is the Flesh

10/2/2020

12 Comments

 
Both of these novels defy easy classification, but I’ve chosen to pair them for their themes of the legacy of slavery, or the way in which owning another person demeans us all. In the first, we follow a young man, marked by his unusual appearance, from babyhood in Jamaica shortly before independence to England and back. The second is a translated Argentinian dystopian novel about cannibalism. In both novels, a character, or characters, withhold or are denied their voice.

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12 Comments

Bending the truth: Inland & Liar

22/10/2019

3 Comments

 
Only in court are we required to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. In our ordinary lives, we stretch, bend and turn it inside out. Not always intentionally, or even consciously, but simply to smooth human interactions and present the best version of ourselves. In the first of these two novels, a Wild-West outlaw needs to create an alter ego to survive, while a frontiers woman needs to revise the details of a family tragedy in order to live with herself. In the second, a lie gives a teenage girl a reprieve from loneliness, and an elderly woman a chance to be heard.

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3 Comments

Keen observers: The Measure of a Man & Bird Cottage

17/10/2019

3 Comments

 
Sometimes, the covers of books I’ve paired for review are so well matched, despite differences in genre, it appears I’ve put them together for aesthetic reasons. But, while I like to dress my blog attractively, it’s the content that counts. These two translated novels fictionalise real-life historical figures who were meticulous observers of the world around them. The first is still celebrated 500 years later; the second has been forgotten in the half-century since her death.

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3 Comments

Observing and conserving: Tiger & The Museum of Broken Promises

2/9/2019

6 Comments

 
While separated by style – the first literary lyrical, the second more off-the-peg – and setting – the first wilderness, the second three cityscapes – these two novels are united by more than a character named Tomas. The main characters of both stories are preoccupied with meticulous observation of the environment: for animal research in Tiger whereas in The Museum of Broken Promises, surveillance might be a more appropriate word. And while the latter is about conserving objects and memories, nature conservation is one of the themes of the first.

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Celebrating another book birthday: Sugar and Snails turns four

23/7/2019

3 Comments

 
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One advantage of getting a new car on the day I published my first novel, is that I’ll always remember when it’s due its MOT. And taking the car for its MOT means I easily remember my book birthday. So what’s happening as my baby turns four? Read on for an interview with one of the minor characters thanks to one of Craig Boyack’s alter egos and an update on revamping the blurb.


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A meadow of our own

5/7/2019

10 Comments

 
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When we moved to this house over twenty years ago, I was most excited about the garden. Although I’d previously worked an allotment, I’d never had custody of shrubberies and trees. That first winter, we cleared a patch of ground for ten raised vegetable beds and another for fruit bushes, fenced-in to keep out the birds. Along with that and creating a pond and patio, we didn’t pay much attention to the grass.

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Every picture paints a story

1/7/2019

6 Comments

 
Although I’m generally more articulate in words than visuals, sometimes the balance swings the other way. Still playing catch-up a busy week and weekend, and with a few things to share before I can fully embrace a new week and new month, I’ve gone for an image-heavy post today. First up, is the gorgeous cover of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, about a woman who has kept her past identity secret for thirty years, which is battling with nine others on cover wars. If you can spare a moment, please follow the link and vote for the one you prefer.
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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 third 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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    Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin: 
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    slug-slayer, tramper of moors, 
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