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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

What’s haunting Peterborough Railway Station? Platform Seven by Louise Doughty

5/3/2024

8 Comments

 
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Would you want to read a novel set on Peterborough Railway Station? If you don’t live in England, you might not have even heard of Peterborough but, for me, having spent a bit of time hanging around that particular station, it was a pleasant surprise to pick up this book and find it located there.
 
Even so, it doesn’t have the charm of London St Pancras with the drop-in piano sessions or the glamour of New York’s Grand Central. So it takes a skilled writer to render that ordinary setting intriguing and Louise Doughty is certainly that.

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8 Comments

Families forced to change: The New Woman & Unless

26/12/2023

2 Comments

 
Here are two moving recent reads about families confronting a life-changing decision by one of their members and the changes they must make to accommodate this. The first is a trans novel published in 2015 which I’ve only just discovered; the second is a story I loved when I first read it on its publication in 2002.
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2 Comments

Two more fictional therapists: Other Women & The Family Retreat

21/12/2023

0 Comments

 
I’ve now collected over ninety fictional therapists, but I’ve always got room for a couple more. In the first of my reviews, the therapist is a relatively minor character in a recently published psychological thriller. In the second, she is one of two main characters in a novel published in the 1980s that purports to be about therapy. Hopefully, forty years on, she’s no longer practising. Let me know whether you agree.

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0 Comments

Young women battling to survive: Year of Wonders & The Marriage Portrait

5/11/2023

10 Comments

 
I’m sharing my thoughts on two historical novels I’ve read recently, both featuring young women struggling to survive against the odds. The first is set in England in the 1660s, the second in Italy a century earlier.

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10 Comments

Luda by Grant Morrison and a flash fiction piece about confidence

14/10/2023

8 Comments

 
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​Luci LaBang is a pantomime dame, beguiled by her co-star, Luda, a young man playing a young woman playing the show’s Principal Boy. Encouraged by the perfectionist director, Luci takes Luda under her wing to teach her the tricks of the trade. But dark forces are underfoot – is Luda victim or villain?

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8 Comments

Women’s Voices in Black History: A More Perfect Union & Night Wherever We Go

6/10/2023

4 Comments

 
October is Black History Month in Europe and the focus this year is on women. So I’m pleased to share my reviews of recent reads of novels by talented Black women writers which illuminate the lives of Black women in mid nineteenth century America. The first interweaves the narrative of another atrocity in which Britain was complicit: the Irish famine. The second shows how far women will go to salvage some control of their fertility.
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4 Comments

Of Cattle and Men and 11 Other Books by Women in Translation

22/8/2023

2 Comments

 
August is women in translation month, a time when readers prioritise books by women in translation – yes, it does what it says on the tin! – and I share the qualifying books I’ve read over the last twelve months. This year’s dozen represents nine languages (two up from last year) – Bosnian, Catalan, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Portuguese, Spanish – and six publishers (Bloomsbury, Charco Press, Europa editions x3, Maclehose Press x 2, Peirene Press x 3, Quercus).
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Here I share one new review, summaries and links to reviews I’ve published over the last twelve months, plus mentions of three I didn’t get round to reviewing.

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2 Comments

Connection and disconnection: Speak to Me by Paula Cocozza

26/6/2023

2 Comments

 
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Even when they’re having sex, Susan’s husband doesn’t give her his full attention. So no wonder she’s jealous of Wendy – not the other woman in the love triangle, but the phone that rarely leaves Kurt’s hand. But Susan has her own obsession: a case of letters that have gone astray when the couple moved house.

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2 Comments

Marriage at a Crossroads: The Fire & The Motion of the Body through Space

5/6/2023

4 Comments

 
Two novels about a difficult patch in a long marriage, complicated by difficult relationships with the couples’ offspring. The first is the best book I’ve read so far this year. The second, by a more famous author, doesn’t come anywhere near.
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4 Comments

Women in translation: History. A Mess & Ada’s Realm

27/3/2023

4 Comments

 
Two translated novels, both with a contemporary and historical element, which address the female struggle for autonomy and self-expression in a misogynistic and racist world.

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4 Comments

Occupied Lands: Arrested Song & Camp Zero

1/3/2023

4 Comments

 
Let me tell you about these two novels about women’s lives in terrain under occupation by external powers. The first is a historical novel about the struggle for personal and political freedom in 20th-century Greece. The second is a futuristic dystopia about how, in the climate crisis, the wealthy lay claim to the coolest lands.
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4 Comments

6 positive social changes in my lifetime: trans visibility; deinstitutionalisation; reproductive rights and more

23/2/2023

10 Comments

 
January marked ten years since I started this blog and last October I published my 1000th post. Whether or not that’s a good thing, I’m minded to celebrate. How about a retrospective?
 
I achieved my dream of becoming a novelist almost 8 years ago, but I want this post to go beyond my bookshelves. Yet, when I look at the world outside, with the climate crisis and increasing inequalities, the view is bleak.
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10 Comments

Woman Power: Daisy Jones and the Six; The Birdcage; The Witches of Vardø; Amazing Grace Adams

14/2/2023

8 Comments

 
I think there is a deep-seated fear and resentment of female power even in situations where we don’t have much of it, so I make no apologies for grouping these novels that touch on the theme from vastly different angles. The first is a historical novel about misogyny manifest in a fantasy of witchcraft. In the second, three half-sisters are haunted by the harm done when they tried to claim their power in adolescence. In the third, a seemingly powerless and self-loathing woman takes a tortured journey through her city and her mistakes. The final novel contemplates the relative power of the singer with a rock band versus the homemaker wife who stands by her man.

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8 Comments

Exiled: All Your Children Scattered & Sisters

2/2/2023

9 Comments

 
I’ve recently read two very different novels in which traumatised mothers suffer a second blow in being distanced from both their children, albeit the separation is for very good reasons. The first is a translation set against the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide. The tragedy in the second is less widespread, restricted to one particular family, but nevertheless extremely painful for those concerned. Read on to discover how these books are about so much more.
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9 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

Black, Queer and marginalised: Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta & Crosshairs

12/12/2022

4 Comments

 
Two novels about the shit that can happen when you’re Black and gender nonconforming that also acknowledge the joy of living true to oneself.

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4 Comments

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

Breaking the cycle? The Bread the Devil Knead & Everything Calls for Salvation

5/11/2022

6 Comments

 
I was unsure how – or whether – I’d connect these two recent reads until I was pondering my response to this week’s flash fiction challenge. Although very different stories, both address how difficult it can be to find an escape route from repeating patterns of self-destructive behaviour. In the first, a woman approaching middle age faces up to her tendency to fall into abusive relationships. In the second, a young man admitted to a psychiatric ward wonders if his own future is written on the faces of his fellow patients, stuck in a cycle of relapse and remission. The wheels keep turning – will they manage to jump off?

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6 Comments

Feminist crime: Woman at Point Zero & After the Silence

25/8/2022

8 Comments

 
Here are two novels in which issues of female disempowerment are explored within a murder narrative. The first is a modern classic, translated from Arabic, set in a culture where women have no custody over their own bodies. The second is a contemporary Irish crime novel, set in a society where men have learnt ways of controlling their partners without leaving a physical mark.

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8 Comments

The startling story of Nellie Bly: Madwoman by Louisa Treger

21/7/2022

6 Comments

 
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Her closeness to her lawyer father has given her a respect for facts. The tales heard at her mother’s knee have fired her passion for story. So, after her father’s sudden death and her mother’s ill-advised marriage to a violent drunkard means the teenager must earn a living, a career as a reporter seems a logical step.
 
At the end of the nineteenth century, respectable women weren’t expected to work, and especially not in a male-dominated environment like a newspaper office. So Nellie Bly – her pen name – must fight prejudice to be taken on by the Pittsburgh Dispatch. But she soon outgrows the provincial newspaper and takes her passion and her ambitions to New York.

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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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4 Comments

Mourning a marriage: The Chosen & So Long a Letter

15/4/2022

6 Comments

 
These two novels depict a character’s reflections on their life following the sudden death of their spouse. Both the male writer in the first novel and the female teacher in the second are mourning not only the loss of a partner but of the promise of their original romance.

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6 Comments

Supernatural identities: Woman, Eating & Witches

31/3/2022

6 Comments

 
Two novels about women whose identities stem from the supernatural: the first, a vampire who moves to London to work in a gallery; the second, a traditional healer in rural Mexico and the journalist who wants to write her story.
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6 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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    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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