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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

On trial for murder or the colour of his skin? A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher

5/1/2024

4 Comments

 
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In early 1952, a new preacher arrives with his teenage son in a small town in northern Vermont from across the border in Montréal. Walt Andrews is hard-working, intelligent, friendly and enterprising. As a bonus, he’s good at sport. Most of the congregation is happy with his appointment, although some are offended by the colour of his skin.

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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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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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Inspired by the Brontës: Ghost Wife & Fifteen Wild Decembers

27/9/2023

4 Comments

 
We can’t get enough of the Brontës, can we? Whether it’s rereading the classic stories or rewriting them or delving into the lives of the authors, the sisters never seem to go out of fashion. So here are two recent reads inspired by them and their books. The first is a contemporary rewrite of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, while the second is historical fiction with a particular focus on Emily, the author of Wuthering Heights.
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Haunted by the Past: The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer translated by James Young

5/7/2023

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​Growing up in the outer suburbs of Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, Camilo is barely aware of the poverty around him and the repression of dissenting voices under the military dictatorship. He has problems enough with his crippled leg and delicate skin that blisters in the savage sun.

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A powerful state-of-the-nation novel: Spring by Ali Smith

16/6/2023

2 Comments

 
An ageing filmmaker, disillusioned by the moral bankruptcy of his current project, loses the will to live after the death of his mentor. A young woman working as a security guard at a migrant detention centre is literally and metaphorically taken for a ride by a precocious twelve-year-old girl. They meet up at a railway station near the site of the Culloden massacre in Scotland where an off-duty librarian driving a coffee van without any coffee picks them up.
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Political fiction: A House for Alice & Henry VIII The Heart & the Crown

20/5/2023

4 Comments

 
Here are reviews of two different types of English political novel. The first is contemporary and addresses how political events impact on an ordinary London family. The second is a historical novel that gets right to the heart of one of the most turbulent periods of British history.
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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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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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History, humour, testimony, short stories and dystopia: there’s something for everyone in these 9 new mini reviews (and 1 mention)

29/1/2023

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Testimonies of historic inequalities rooted in racism: The Help & In the Upper Country

14/1/2023

8 Comments

 
I’m pleased to share my thoughts on two recent reads which focus on collecting the testimonies of women wounded by policies and practices rooted in racism: the first set in the early 1960s and the second century before.
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8 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

My 12 favourite reads of 2022

18/12/2022

2 Comments

 
The year’s not quite over, but I’m taking a risk and committing to these as my twelve favourite reads of 2022. Scroll down for single-sentence reviews of eleven recently-published novels (a couple in translation) plus one modern classic. Not unusually for me, there’s a strong social justice theme addressing both contemporary and historical issues, including the on, LGBTQ rights in fiction, climate crisis, religion, race and culture, migration and LGBTQ rights, coupled with strong characterisation, fine writing and touches of humour. Click on the title for my full review of any that take your fancy.

Do let me know which, if any, appeal to you and what have been your favourite reads of the year.

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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

When and where was Britain’s first Black policeman?

30/10/2022

3 Comments

 
I love the freedom fiction gives me to make things up, but I also enjoy the facts I discover in the course of my research. In my novella, Stolen Summers, I gave my character, Matilda, a dancing partner who attracted and intrigued her, partly because he came from a different background.

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3 Comments

Disturbing the peace? The Hush & The Sweetness of Water

13/10/2022

2 Comments

 
A woman lives with her husband on a farm a short distance from a small town. There’s a distance between the partners also but they’re bound by habit and circumstance. When strangers arrive on their land, convention dictates they should chase them away. Instead, a tentative friendship develops, much to their neighbours’ disapproval and it’s not too long before violence ensues.
 
The link is often tenuous when I pair my reviews. But, even when there’s a common theme, it’s unusual for a four-sentence summary to serve both. Heck, even the covers match! Yet, while both brilliant debuts, these are very different novels: the first a near-future cli-fi dystopia; the second a historical novel set at the end of the American Civil War. Read on to see which you’ll pick up first!
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Swimming through Stolen Summers

10/9/2022

4 Comments

 
When the prompt arrived for this week’s 99-word story, I immediately thought of my character Matty. Not only because I’ve been reading and rereading and scrutinising a part of her history I want to publish next month, but because swimmingly is exactly the kind of word she’d use (although I don’t think she ever has).

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Fostered: Lily & Careless

19/8/2022

8 Comments

 
I’ve recently read a historical novel and a contemporary YA novel featuring fostered girls. In the first, it’s idyllic, especially in contrast to the institution she’s sent to at the age of six. In the second, it’s more problematic with a foster mother who can’t put her own needs aside to support the child in her care.
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Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall translated by Philip Boehm #WITmonth

3/8/2022

4 Comments

 
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When word reaches the Warsaw ghetto of the terrible consequences Nazis have in mind for Jews, Izolda feels a great responsibility to save her family. And if she can’t protect her parents and in-laws, she is determined that she and her husband will live.

Changing her name, her hair, her religion, she sets about finding hiding places, travelling in and out of the ghetto via the sewers. She faces rape, imprisonment, forced labour, torture and a spell in a concentration camp, surviving on her wits and her love. But is that enough and is it worth it? As an old woman with no language in common with her Israeli granddaughters, she’s not sure.

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4 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

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

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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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

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

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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    Free ebook: click the image to claim yours.
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    Available now
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    The poignant prequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home
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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 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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