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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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Therapy for characters in under sixty seconds

5/5/2022

6 Comments

 
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There's nothing about TikTok in my 2022 reading and writing plans. Why would there be? I'm far too serious for that kind of stuff. Yet a couple of weeks after I posted those plans I'd signed up for an account. Now I'm addicted.
 
Why? Because I've sold a few books, although not as many as I'd like to. But mostly because it's a fun place to be.

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6 Comments

In treatment: The Definition of Us & The Lobotomist’s Wife

21/2/2022

8 Comments

 
These novels – the first contemporary YA; the second historical fiction – address radically different responses to mental health issues wrapped up in page-turning stories. I enjoyed them both in different ways.

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8 Comments

Keeping going: The Life of the Mind & The Retreat

12/11/2021

10 Comments

 
I was going to call this post hopes dashed, but that would be too sensational for these two lovely novels about women getting on with it after disappointment, not because they’re heroic survivors but because they’re ordinary flawed human beings. In the first, an untenured academic carries on as normal despite a drawn-out miscarriage; in the second, an aspiring artist continues painting despite a lack of talent and community support. Both stories unfold in elegant understated prose with touches of humour.

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Sex and the consulting room: Lying on the Couch & Portnoy’s Complaint

26/12/2020

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Two novels featuring sex and psychotherapy: can you guess which one I couldn’t finish? The other is both entertaining and educational, so put your feet up and read on.

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Female friends: The Group & Girls of Riyadh

9/6/2020

2 Comments

 
These two novels about female friends from two different cultures and at different stages of their lives expose the power imbalance between even privileged and highly educated women and the men in their lives. The first is a thoughtful novel about middle-aged women in London; the second a lighter story about young adults in Saudi Arabia.

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Lockdown dis-easing and risk assessment, personal and political

5/6/2020

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Arrive late, leave early! Excellent advice for fiction writers pruning the unnecessaries from our scenes. Equally useful for introverts who quickly tire of socialising. But for a public health initiative in a pandemic? The UK is showing the world how not to do lockdown, introducing it too late and loosening the restrictions too early. Could it be that the occupant of number 10, having achieved his ambition of becoming prime minister has been using his undoubted spare time to brush up his skills in creative writing? Could it be that covid-brain has mangled his already
muddled pathways so that he’s imposed a strategy for achieving his next unlikely ambition – if a man of his talents can “lead” first a capital city, then a country, why not go for the Booker Prize? – upon the one of which he’s tired?

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How our minds work: Tyll & Human Traces

19/1/2020

10 Comments

 
Although these two historical novels are very different, both sparked some deep reflection about the workings of the human mind, and especially how our reasoning and problem-solving is influenced by beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, are shaped by the times and cultures in which we live. Both are set primarily in mainland Europe – the first in the seventeenth century and the second towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth – and feature – predominantly in the first and latterly in the second – countries ravaged by war.
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Seeking sanctuary in strange places: Dolores & I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

27/12/2019

6 Comments

 
In these two novels, a teenage girl needs a safe place to retreat from the world, but the sanctuary she’s chosen won’t easily let her go. In the first, a convent provides shelter to a girl fearful of the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy; in the second, a psychiatric hospital offers a welcome respite from the strain of appearing sane. It’s pure coincidence that the main characters’ names – Dolores and Deborah – begin with the same letter and that both remind me of my forthcoming novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home.


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Bicultural: The Topeka School & The God Child

22/12/2019

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Amid the painful aftermath of the UK ‘people’ voting in our pig in a poke, I had reason to remind myself of the literature on the cognitive advantages biculturalism. While I doubt our new PM possesses the skills or intellect to unite an increasingly polarised country – or even the desire, whatever might spout from his mouth – it’s essential if we’re to avoid civil war as we helter-skelter into economic and climactic ruin. So, although neither of these very disparate novels is primarily about straddling two cultures, I make no apologies for linking them via this theme.

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Novel perspectives on psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy: The Saturday Morning Murder & A Good Enough Mother

2/4/2019

4 Comments

 
If you’ve read my previous reviews of fictional therapists, you’ll be aware that I’m often disappointed in authors who seem to have neglected their background research. Not so with these two novels: the first, set in Jerusalem in the late 1980s, providing an excellent insight into the closed and potentially claustrophobic culture of psychoanalysis; the second, set in contemporary London, clarifying the key principles of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Both are flagged as crime: the first a police procedural; the second more psychological suspense.

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4 Comments

Beneath the surface calm: Stories We Tell Ourselves & And the Wind Sees All

11/12/2018

2 Comments

 
Reading these books consecutively, I doubted I could legitimately pair their reviews. The first focuses on the tensions in an Anglo-French family Christmas, the second an Icelandic fishing village anticipating a celebratory concert in mid-summer. But both are about the pain beneath a deceptively tranquil surface, and the psychological distance between people living in close proximity.

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Women who contain multitudes: Freshwater  & Killing Hapless Ally

26/10/2018

4 Comments

 
I’ve recently read two semi-autobiographical debuts about highly intelligent young women battling initially protective and subsequently persecutory alter egos to assert their real selves. The first set in Nigeria and the USA, the second in the UK, they provide fresh perspectives on the experience of mental disturbance from the inside.


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Mother issues: Leila & She Chose Me

14/10/2018

8 Comments

 
Two novels with an unusual perspectives on mothers and mothering: the first an Indian dystopian novel about a woman’s rapid descent down the social scale after her husband and three-year-old daughter are taken from her; the second an English psychological thriller about a woman who never had, nor wanted, children who receives a Mother’s Day card in the post.


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8 Comments

Holiday settings: Murmuration & The Summer House

8/7/2018

6 Comments

 
If you’re going on holiday this summer, you might be tempted to take one of these novels with you. The first focuses on the people who entertain and assist the visitors to a Victorian pier at an English seaside resort across a period of over a century; the second on a family taking a long holiday together on the coast of Finland. But, of course, while it might be all smiles and bonhomie on the surface, there are disconcerting undercurrents to keep you turning the page. Let me know which takes your fancy.

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Psychoanalysis, friendship and failure: Jott by Sam Thompson

10/6/2018

8 Comments

 
The world poses impossible questions and the future is in darkness, you have no claim on health or peace or the way that you feel things ought to be, you are required to live without knowing what comes next, you must carry on in hope as best you can, and you must begin by attending to one another.

Despite differences in lifestyle and temperament, the friendship between Arthur and Louis, begun as pupils at an Irish boarding school, has endured through university in Dublin to early adulthood in 1930s London. Arthur, a junior psychiatrist, has always been overshadowed by his friend, an unpublished writer with the flair and determination to live by his own rules. While Arthur is shy and socially awkward, Louis can charm anyone, including Arthur, such that the psychiatrist often finds himself sacrificing his own needs for the sake of his friend.
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8 Comments

Reimagining the birth pangs of psychoanalysis: When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D Yalom

2/6/2018

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In 1882, in a wintry Vienna, two brilliant minds connect. One is an ambitious, although rarely read, philosopher; the other is a highly respected diagnostician and doctor to the rich and famous. The men are drawn to each other’s ideas but, although one’s a bachelor and the other a married father of five, they have more in common than they realise. Both men’s obsession with a much younger woman is threatening their well-being.



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Tragic misunderstandings: Missing & Speak No Evil

28/5/2018

3 Comments

 
When the press release described Speak No Evil as “a novel about the power of words”, I thought it would fit nicely with Missing, about a translator who has personal reasons for using precise verbalisations. But, although I could see what the publishers were getting at, it didn’t chime strongly with my reading experience. Nevertheless, these short novels – the first from the UK, the second from the US and Nigeria – have something in common: the grief and guilt that has diverted a woman’s life after a tragic misunderstanding at the age of eighteen. But, given that exactly how that happened is part of the mystery, you won’t find much about that in my reviews. Don’t let that stop you reading on, as both these novels are well worth your time.


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After art school: The Chalk Artist & You

4/5/2018

8 Comments

 
After my last post featuring two novels about fictional teenagers going missing in the Peak District, the link between these reviews is more tenuous. While both feature men who have found a salaried position after art school – the first going into the gaming industry without completing his degree; the second joining the ranks of fictional therapists as a rare art therapist – these novels seem quite different. Yet both also feature obsession: the first with the alternate reality of computer games; the second with an estranged daughter. See what you think.

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Fictional teenagers going missing in the Peak District: Reservoir 13 & Whistle in the Dark

3/5/2018

2 Comments

 
Oh dear! As a Ranger in the Peak District, albeit only as a volunteer on alternate Sundays, I carry a sense of responsibility for the safety of visitors to the National Park. So it’s rather disconcerting to read about two teenage girls, on holiday from London, going missing there in a matter of weeks. Fortunately, both were characters in novels, and both providing the foundation for an engrossing story about the repercussions: the first for the residents of a fictional Derbyshire village; the second for the family of the girl who is found after four agonising days.

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In the not-too-distant future: The Unit & Anna

21/3/2018

4 Comments

 
Setting a novel in the near future requires two extra decisions. To what extent will this imagined world differ from what’s familiar today? What defines that difference? Although the social, environmental and technological developments or regressions in this fictional landscape are inevitably interlinked, one factor tends to dominate (and perhaps determines the readership to which it most appeals). At least that’s what I’ve been thinking since reading The Unit and Anna back-to-back (as well as recent dabbling in one of the subgenres myself). In the first, a democratic society has agreed (over time) that the lives of economically and socially unproductive citizens can be sacrificed for the common good. In the second, feral children roam a post-apocalyptic world in which adults have been wiped out by a virus and most of the infrastructure by a fire. Tempted? Read on!

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4 Comments

Loners: Eleanor Oliphant & Upstate

27/2/2018

6 Comments

 
Two novels featuring women, scarred by life, who have kept themselves slightly aloof. Of the two, Eleanor Oliphant is the most damaged, but small acts of kindness, along with a crush on a self-centred musician, might bring her out of her shell. Upstate is perhaps more realistic in confronting the difficulty of change, even though, when we first meet Vanessa Querry she’s no longer lonely as she’s fallen in love. Eleanor gets the better therapist; but is either of these women completely fine?

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People studies: Sight & Consent

19/2/2018

2 Comments

 
Although these two novels couldn’t be more different in tone – the first a literary exploration of a young mother’s development; the second tricksy thriller – I can’t resist pairing them for the other factors they have in common. Both feature thoughtful, philosophising, unnamed narrators; both take as their subject matter how we explore the inside and outside of other people, and ourselves. Both are ambitious and unusual in their approach; both are the author’s second book and a cracking read.

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2 Comments

Anger is understandable in Crimes of the Father & Seeing Red

12/10/2017

2 Comments

 
Life’s a game of snakes and ladders; we all have our ups and downs. But some people’s snakes are much longer than some other people’s ladders, and some so unlucky on the roll of the dice it’s like they’ve landed in a slithery nest of snakes. If fear or despair hasn’t shut down their emotions, these people are angry, understandably so. And that’s my tenuous link between these novels: the first about a young woman’s sudden blindness and the second about the victims of paedophile priests.

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Two novel perspectives on childhood friendship lost

6/9/2017

4 Comments

 
After reading The Things We Thought We Knew shortly before its publication back in June, I decided to hang back for another novel on psychosomatic illness or acquired disability with which to pair my review. But picking up The Burning Girl more recently, I was struck by the commonalities between these two novels, not only in the obvious sense of a girl in her late teens looking back on an intense friendship, but in the depth of disturbance resulting from its loss. As happened when I coupled two novels on male infidelity, discovering the similarities enhanced my appreciation of both. While neither pairing uncovered themes of particular personal relevance for me (which can enhance my enjoyment), the fact that they matter sufficiently for more than one author persuades me that other readers might find more to savour. Do let me know if that applies to you!

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Two novel views of disillusionment within South African healthcare

27/7/2017

3 Comments

 
Two authors with their own lived experience of the challenges of working in South African health care. Two fictional healthcare professionals forced to confront their own privilege within the system and the limitations of what they can achieve. One black, one white; one psychologist, one medical doctor; one in contemporary post-apartheid, one in an imagined dystopia in which it never ends. Two political novels; two engaging reads. Let me know which of them takes your fancy.

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    OUT NOW: The poignant prequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home
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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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