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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin writes entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice. She has published three novels and a short story collection with Inspired Quill. Her debut, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. Her new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is rooted in her work as a clinical psychologist in a long-stay psychiatric hospital.

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Sidelined women: The Dance Tree & Lacuna

12/5/2022

3 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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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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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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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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Together apart: Hare House & Our Country Friends

10/1/2022

3 Comments

 
We can choose our friends but not our neighbours, unless we happen to own a plot of land with cottages to rent or offer free to selected guests. In which case we should choose carefully: in a crisis, out in the countryside, we might have to rely on our neighbours more than we’d expect. But as renters and guests we might not have a say in the matter, as these two novels highlight. The first is about a woman unsettled by the folk beliefs of her neighbours in rural Scotland; the second about a temporarily covid-free community in upstate New York.

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Post-truth worlds: A Time Outside This Time & Scary Monsters

2/1/2022

3 Comments

 
When I selected these books for my first reviews of 2022, I thought all they shared was their UK publication date of January 6th. I was wrong. Both are unconventionally structured novels by and about migrants, from the Indian subcontinent, to rich countries founded on the genocide of their indigenous populations, where truth is sometimes sacrificed on the altar of populist politics and the realities of racism and the climate crisis denied. Read on for the different ways these authors handled their theme.

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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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10 new mini reviews … and a virtual bookshop

14/10/2021

2 Comments

 
Knowing how much I value reviews of my own fiction, I endeavour to pay it forward for other authors. Indeed, I consider posting reviews to be fundamental to literary citizenship. But they can be dreadfully time-consuming.

This year, I'm experimenting with posting mini reviews both here and on Goodreads. As you'll see from the chart – and yes, I'm not getting any of my own writing done when I'm playing around on Canva – these aren't books I haven't enjoyed (a 4 star rating from me is a strong endorsement). Rather, they're books I don't have much to say about.

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I'll continue posting longer reviews of books gifted to me by the author or publisher, but I'll probably keep this up for books I've bought myself. It should work for me, but will it work for you? Let me know in the comments what you think.

Read on for reviews of six contemporary novels, one classic novel, a short story collection and two non-fiction books, all read over the last three months.


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Otherwise forgotten: The Girl Behind the Gates & Stephen from the Inside Out

5/9/2021

10 Comments

 
I’m sharing my reflections on two books I read recently, which I enjoyed despite not being my usual reads. I bought them because they relate to my interest in mental health issues, but there must have been more than that. Both are based on true stories - the second is actually creative non-fiction - about the author’s friendship with someone who has a psychiatric diagnosis and has been subjected to a care system that is often uncaring. Like my latest novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, they celebrate marginalised lives.

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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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Inside disturbed minds: Wide Sargasso Sea & The Octopus Man

21/5/2021

12 Comments

 
These two recent reads about a subject close to my heart: finding the meaning within supposed madness and unOthering those deemed severely mentally ill. The first is a classic, an antidote to the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre; the second, which deserves to become a classic, published this year. I have no hesitation in recommending them both.

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Fatherless boys: Little Boy Lost & My Grandmother’s Braid

12/3/2021

10 Comments

 
I’ve been reading about fictional male vulnerability in this contemporary translation and this classic from seven decades ago. In the latter, a man has lost his infant son in Nazi-occupied France. Although he’s had an easier war in England, he’s almost as lost as the child. In the other, a family flees poverty in Russia, ostensibly in the hope of better health care for an orphaned boy. But perhaps it’s not him, but his grandparents, who need help most.

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10 Comments

Modern Classics set on hospital wards: Memento Mori & One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

6/3/2021

14 Comments

 
Here we have two highly successful mid-twentieth century novels with hospital settings. The first is a comedy of manners only partly set on a medical ward for older women in a London hospital; the second is an exuberant but ultimately devastating portrayal of an Oregon State medical hospital. What’s it like to read/reread them during pandemic six decades after they first hit the shelves?

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Black and gay in America: Memorial & The Prophets

23/2/2021

12 Comments

 
It was good to read these two American novels about Black gay men, especially during LGBT history month: the second set in 19th-century Mississippi and an unnamed part of Africa; the first set in contemporary Texas and Japan.

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London friends: A Net for Small Fishes & Open Water

3/2/2021

2 Comments

 
What’s the impact of inequality and injustice on friendship? These two London-set novels might go some way to helping us understand. In the first, two women unite to claim a degree of personhood and agency within the culture of misogyny in the court of James I; in the second, a young Black man struggles to maintain a loving relationship within a contemporary climate of institutional racism.

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No place in the American dream: Stoner & Interior Chinatown

8/11/2020

4 Comments

 
No, I'm not going to mention the election, although I read the second of these two novels as a certain world leader screamed for the count to be suspended in some states and accelerated in others. And I wouldn't want to speculate on whether the status of these fictionalised ordinary Americans might shed some light on how half the country lost its mind. But I do love a story that upends the American dream. Where is the space for those who don’t strive for success and fame? Where do the American Asians fit in the narrative? Prepare to be provoked and entertained!

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To and from Jamaica: Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract; Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole; Augustown

21/10/2020

2 Comments

 
When I selected my reading for Black History Month, I didn’t realise that three of the four books had a connection to Jamaica. Nor did I realise that one would obscure black history as much as it illuminates. While three books are around ninety-seven short of composing a timeline, they’re listed here in chronological order of the events they portray. Scroll down for links to my reviews of other books (mostly fiction) I’ve read in recent years.

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For better or worse (or much worse): An American Marriage & Soldier Boy

29/9/2020

6 Comments

 
These two recent reads are about marriages under severe strain. In the first, set in the southern USA, a woman turns to a mutual friend when her husband is sentenced to twelve years’ in prison for the crime of being black in the vicinity of a sexual assault. In the second, set in the UK, a family is in crisis as a result of the husband and father’s combat PTSD.

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Holidays, families and home: Summerwater & Ties

23/9/2020

2 Comments

 
These two novels defy easy categorisation, but I’ve paired them for the combination of depth and humour, innovative structure and switching points of view. Both feature the dynamics of family and coupledom, and a holiday – the first in Scotland, the second in Italy – with destructive consequences.

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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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What seriously tickles your funny bone? V for Victory & I Am Not Sidney Poitier

7/8/2020

4 Comments

 
Humour is a tricky business, especially around serious subjects. Get it right, and you can entertain while inciting rage at injustice. Get it wrong, and you risk becoming the target of rage. So what did I make of these two comic novels? The first set in Blitz-blasted London, the second in contemporary Atlanta, which draws you most and are you able to guess which I’d prefer?

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New girl in town: The Day My Grandfather Was a Hero & Finding Soutbek

29/7/2020

4 Comments

 
When I studied the psychodynamics of organisations, I was encouraged to pay particular attention to how the system responds to a new arrival. Likewise in fiction, the introduction of an outsider is a useful strategy for delving under the skin of a community, especially one in crisis. In both these recent reads, the outsider is a teenage girl, bereft of family, who is smoothly absorbed into the existing structures and, to a small degree, starts to change them. In the first, a translated novella, set in Austria at the end of the Second World War, she is the main point-of-view character. In the second, a debut novel with a contemporary South African setting, she is one of several somewhat shadowy characters. But both books are more about historical and geographical place than person. See what you think.

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12 recommended reads for World Refugee Day

20/6/2020

8 Comments

 
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Twenty people a minute abandon their homes to escape war, persecution or terror. The United Nations has designated June 20 as World Refugee Day in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, stateless persons and returnees. The global pandemic means they need our support more than ever; having made my donation, I’m ready to share some fiction books you might like to read. All were published within the last ten years and are loosely arranged in historical order of the story setting, beginning with two set in the Second World War and ending with two which are timeless. I’ve limited myself to twelve, but could have chosen more. I hope you find something here to tempt you.

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Racism, entitlement and political protest in the age of covid

12/6/2020

10 Comments

 
Recently I was first-world-problems moaning about the deluge of emails from individuals and organisations offering to fill my apparently endless lockdown free time. Now it’s people shouting their condemnation of the murder of George Floyd and either flaunting their antiracist credentials or vowing to do better. My immediate reaction was: does it need to be said? On the one hand, if you’re sitting in my inbox, abhorrence should be your default setting. On the other, white people’s silence could be taken as support for the status quo.

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Faith, fate and freedom: Pilgrims & The Yogini

3/6/2020

4 Comments

 
Where once it was religion that kept the poor downtrodden, now it’s capitalism as expressed in the Great American Dream, that we can all be winners if we set our minds to it. Both these novels transport the modern mind to a time and place where characters are conscious that not everything that happens is under their control. But that doesn’t stop them from trying to appease the superpowers or exercise free will. In the first, we meet a group of thirteenth century pilgrims sacrificing earthly pleasures for an easier eternity; in the second, a young woman in modern secular India grapples with the ancient Hindu concept of fate.

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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
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