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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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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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A woman’s place? Lessons in Chemistry & Daughters Beyond Command

6/12/2022

6 Comments

 
These two recent reads are about challenging women’s traditional roles as homemakers in the mid twentieth century. The first focuses on the barriers facing a woman seeking a career in science in early 1960s America. The second follows the fortunes of three sisters and their mother as the times change in 1970s France.
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6 Comments

Aftermath: The Tin Nose Shop & The Wilderness

12/7/2022

6 Comments

 
These two novels are about the consequences of untimely deaths on those left behind. The first is set during the First World War when a grieving soldier is set to work making masks to hide the horrific facial injuries of those wounded in the trenches. The second is about two orphaned sisters and an anthropologist with unconventional ideas about mourning rituals.

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6 Comments

A certain kind of freedom: Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont & The Men

25/6/2022

11 Comments

 
I’ve linked these two very different novels via the theme of compromised freedom, partly because that’s how I feel myself right now. In the first, an elderly widow frees herself from pity by casting a stranger as her grandson but fears being found out. In the second, women are magically freed from misogyny at a cost of losing the men and boys they love.

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11 Comments

Sidelined women: The Dance Tree & Lacuna

12/5/2022

4 Comments

 
Allow me to introduce two novels about the marginalisation of women’s experience: the first set in sixteenth century Strasbourg where the church rules hearts and minds; the second in contemporary a South Africa grappling with its colonial past. Both include a scene of arson, but that is not the worst of the violence.
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No two people will read the exact same story

20/4/2022

8 Comments

 
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Although many of us read for relaxation, our brains are far from passive as we do so. We actively process the words on page or screen through the filter of our own experience. Because everyone is different, we won’t find identical meanings in the same text.


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The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad

3/4/2022

2 Comments

 



A page-turning debut about power, patriarchy and politics; separation and secrets; set in late 1960s Pakistan.
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2 Comments

Ready to change? Peach Blossom Spring & Voting Day

24/3/2022

6 Comments

 
Two fabulous fiction books about ordinary people in historically significant times. The first is a family saga set in China, Taiwan and America across six decades of the twentieth century. The second is a snapshot of Swiss history on a single day in 1959 when the male half of the populace denied their mothers, sisters and wives the right to vote.

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6 Comments

Kinds of caring: Marzahn, Mon Amour & Here Again Now

8/3/2022

6 Comments

 
Here are two books featuring different kinds of caring: the first a translated memoir about a healthcare professional who looks after people’s minds along with their feet; the second a novel about an actor who opens his home to his struggling father and to his childhood friend.

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6 Comments

Moral compromise: Mouth to Mouth & Booth

28/2/2022

4 Comments

 
These two recent reads feature characters who find themselves in morally compromised situations, partly of their own making. The first, set in the contemporary US art world, is about a young man’s relationship with a middle-aged man he saves from drowning. The second, set during a turbulent time in American history, focuses on a family of thespians, drinkers and dreamers.


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Unconventional couples: Devotion & Love Marriage

26/1/2022

5 Comments

 
Let me present two chunky novels, both published in the UK on 3rd February, about which I had some reservations but came to love. Despite a decade’s difference in age between the novels’ protagonists, both are coming-of-age stories in which an unexpected kind of love – or unconventional for their particular communities – teaches these young women about family, ambition, identity and themselves.

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Recent reads: The Lobster’s Shell & Harrow

21/1/2022

2 Comments

 
I’ve paired these two novels because they both address human failings in unconventional ways. The first, translated from the Danish, illustrates the barriers to connection via a large cast of characters. The second is a zany take on our collective complicity in environmental collapse. Oh, and because the title of the first reminds me of Dali’s telephone, while I can only assume the enigmatic title of the second is intentionally surreal.


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2 Comments

The sibling bond: A Sister’s Story & The Sky Above The Roof

15/1/2022

3 Comments

 
Here I introduce two translated novellas – the first from Italian, the second from French – about the bond between siblings, survivors of damaging childhoods. They illustrate the difficulties of closing the door on the past.


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3 Comments

Confined in crazy places: If At First & Piranesi

19/12/2021

5 Comments

 
These very different novels are both about young men detained in strange settings: the first a psychiatric ward; the second a labyrinth. Steven, in the first, is a reluctant captive who needs to learn the value of where he’s landed in order to leave. Piranesi, in the second, seems perfectly adapted to his environment, but he needs to discover the dark side to become his full self.

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Dodgy business: Ceremony of Innocence & Dirt Clean

16/12/2021

2 Comments

 
Allow me to introduce you to two novels that expose Britain’s dirty hands in the immoral corporate wheeling and dealing that directly harm the poor both here and abroad. If that sounds heavy, remember that the beauty of fiction is that it can wrap that painful politics in a gripping narrative of romance and intrigue. Now, isn’t that a step up from governments that condone such corruption or, at least, turn a blind eye?

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2 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

In the public eye: Trust & Blue Skinned Gods

28/10/2021

10 Comments

 
Here we have two novels about (celebrity, and the darker side of men whose virtue is part of their fame. In the first, translated from the Italian and set in Rome, an author, teacher and public intellectual can never completely relax into his positive reputation for fear a secret he shared with a former lover will be revealed. In the second, set in New York and rural Tamil Nadu, a young man brought up to believe he’s a living god has to decide whether to continue in the role his father and his followers have given him when he discovers the truth about himself.

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The Memory by Judith Barrow … a review and a videoed conversation

20/10/2021

4 Comments

 
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Irene is eight when her sister Rose is born, and she can’t understand why her mother isn’t more excited. Her family used to be fun, laughing and playing, but now her mum hardly does anything, leaving Irene, her dad and her nanna to attend to the baby.
 
Presumably, Lillian, the mother, is suffering from postnatal depression, but this drags on and on. She can’t accept that she has a daughter with Down’s syndrome. As Irene takes on the mothering duties, Lillian seems less and less part of the family.

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4 Comments

Memories and mothers: The Leftovers & Small Forgotten Moments

22/9/2021

6 Comments

 
The human mind has a wonderful capacity to protect us from unbearable memories, but there’s always a cost. As the narrators of these two novels discover when circumstances compel them to spend time with the mothers from whom they’ve grown apart. Read on to see which takes your fancy; I can heartily recommend reading both.
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6 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

The past lingers on: Ever Rest, Old Bones and This Other Island

18/7/2021

10 Comments

 
Three short reviews of novels about how the past keeps hold of us. The first two are connected by the discovery of a body and a sleepy Shropshire village; the third novel, This Other Island, is, like Ever Rest, mostly set in London and, like Old Bones, it’s about family secrets.

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10 Comments

Love and loss: Empire of Wild, The Exile and the Mapmaker & Suiza

12/7/2021

10 Comments

 
Three short reviews of novels on the theme of love and loss: the first, set in Canada, about a woman whose husband disappears and turns up a year later with a new identity; the second, set in France, is about a man who yearns to be reunited with the lover from his youth before he loses himself to dementia; the third, a translated novel set in Spain, is about the tender relationship that develops between two brutalised people.

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Four novels that inspired Annalisa Crawford’s Small Forgotten Moments

9/7/2021

11 Comments

 
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Annalisa Crawford, author of Grace and Serenity, has a new novel out next month, and she’s kindly agreed to tell us about some of the fiction that inspired Small Forgotten Moments. Two of her chosen four are novels I’ve also read and enjoyed. I’ll hand over to Annalisa to introduce all four.
 
Thanks for inviting me onto your blog today, Anne. I thought I’d share some of the books which have inspired me while writing my new novel Small Forgotten Moments, and the months (even years!) which preceded it.

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11 Comments

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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8 Comments

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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    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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