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Blog postLet me tell you about these four novels featuring older women looking back at their lives, and forward, some with dread, to what’s left of it. The first is a translated novel set in Belarus. The second and fourth are set in care homes around the middle of the twentieth century. The third is a contemporary novel set in a London hospital with flashbacks to a glittery Alexandria. All illustrate the vulnerability of old age, but also the strength and spirit of the central characters.
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Blog postI grew up in a small coastal town in north-west England, and left to go to university at eighteen. It wasn’t the prettiest of places, but we had the Lake District to the east of us, sandy beaches north and south and a view across the sea to Scotland.
I wrote in secret when I lived there, stories set in some undefined elsewhere. Fictional towns no more interesting than the one that made me, except that they gave my mind room to roam.
It felt significant that I began wri -
Blog postThree 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.
Ever Rest by Roz Morris
Childhood friends Ash and Hugo were the acclaimed rock ban -
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Blog postThree 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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Blog postAnnalisa 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 Sm -
Blog postA black-and-white photograph links two of the three point-of-view characters in my new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home. In Henry’s interpretation, it shows a father, his glamorous teenage daughter and his young son on holiday at Blackpool, a popular English seaside resort. Matty’s version has a ragged edge and shows only two people: an unknown woman in a polka-dot dress holding the hand of a boy with the Eiffel Tower sprouting from his head. If these two rendit
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Blog postReading isn’t a race, but when Goodreads invites me to set myself a target, and offers to monitor my progress, I’m happy to join in. For the past few years, I’ve aimed for 100 books, smugly confident I’ll sail across the finishing line before the trees shed their leaves. But not this year. Based on my stats so far, I’ll be lucky to reach my centenary by Christmas.
It doesn’t matter, although I wonder why it is. I’m not slowing down in other ways and I still get a thrill from discovering a -
Blog postHere 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.
Moth by Melody Razak
Alma is fourteen, and a young fourteen at that, so I was somewhat alarmed to find she was about to be married. Her parents, both -
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Blog postBoth 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.
Tonight Is Already Tomorrow by Lia Levi translated by Clarissa Botsford
When introduced to a -
Blog postThese two historical novels, set near the dawn of the twentieth century, illustrate how appallingly women’s freedoms, even – or especially – over custody of their own bodies, have been controlled by men. Both stories take place in or around institutions: the first an Irish hospital battling the pandemic; the second a university battling the ordinary citizens of an English town.
The Pull of the Sta -
Blog postThese 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.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
With the passing o -
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Blog postForgive the tenuous connection between these recent reads, the first featuring harem women in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century and the second a contemporary Italian girl who grows into a woman while imprisoned in a container. While you might shudder at the latter, I urge you to give it a chance, as it’s one of my favourite reads of 2021.
The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif
In the late -
Blog postWell, what do you know? I can’t recall when I last read a novel featuring a kidnapping, and then two come along at once, both published (in the UK at least) on the same day (May 6). It’s worth noting, however, that I wouldn’t have flagged them as kidnap stories if I were posting these reviews individually. But it does distinguish them from the many other novels I might read about friendship and women’s lives from childhood to middle age. The first is set in the USA and the second in Nigeria and,
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Blog postAllow me to introduce two recent reads featuring a teenage girl’s sexual awakening with a physically attractive but morally suspect young man, arousing the envy of her less confident suitor. Both novels also emphasise her passion for the place in which she lives: in the first, a derelict asylum in southern England; in the second, the family farm in rural France.
Wreaking by James Scudamore
Cleo i -
Blog postLet’s consider two novels published this month which direct the reader’s gaze towards the characters’ inner lives, mentally and physically. The first, set in Australia during the recent rampaging bushfires, focuses on the characters’ wandering minds as they watch a play. The second, set in the Americas, looks in on the body and outwards to the stars.
The Performance by Claire Thomas
Even before l -
Blog postWhat an honour to be name-checked in Charli’s post introducing the latest flash fiction challenge on rethinking the hero’s journey. Having been obsessed with my reservations about this story structure in the past, and equally obsessed with recording random ideas for the blog, I went to my drafts folder to look for something I could revise. Step forward Unheroic characters, grief, ambivalence and mourning. Right, okay? Except I find I’m no longer so obsessed. Never mi
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Blog postThese two recent rereads focus on older characters who have been diminished by their culture’s punitive attitudes to their sexuality. In the first, a contemporary Londoner has hidden his love for his closest friend on account of the Caribbean community’s homophobia. In the second, a woman has been ostracised in twentieth-century Ireland because of the misogyny and genophobia among the powerful Catholic clergy. Yet a degree of redemption is offered to the characters, albeit late in life.
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Blog postThese two novels are about women over forty for whom life has lost its sparkle, partly due to marital infidelity and an empty nest. The first is a nuanced portrayal of contemporary middle age, set in Paris; the second is a shallow glimpse at widowhood and fear of ageing, set in the 1980s on England’s south coast.
Scent by Isabel Costello
Clémentine is a wife, mother and successful perfumer in Par -
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Blog postSalina roams aimlessly through the desert, sequentially accompanied by each of her three sons. Harold is physically and mentally unprepared for his epic journey, although he does have a specific destination in sight. Salina’s story unfolds in a newly-published novella, translated from the French; Harold’s in a deceptively light bestseller, published in 2012.
Salina by Laurent Gaudé translated by A -
Blog postI’m sharing my reflections on these recent reads about the aftermath of a family tragedy, the first set in 1970s rural England and the second in contemporary Alabama. Both are by women writers whose previous novels I’ve loved and I’m delighted to say they didn’t disappoint.
Harvest by Georgina Harding
A young Japanese woman goes to stay at her boyfriend’s home in Norfolk, in what seems to be the -
Blog postI’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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Blog postHere 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?
Memento M -
Blog postMuch as I enjoy pontificating about books, there are times when I genuinely don't have much to say. It might be because I haven't connected strongly with the style or story. It might be that my mind is too busy elsewhere. But I do like using my blog and Goodreads as a kind of reading archive. This is my first experiment in using both for bite-size reviews.
Last Friends by Jane Gardam
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Sadly not up to the standard of the other two novels in the tril -
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Blog postIt 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.
Memorial by Bryan Washington
Benson and Mike were happily coupled until around four years ago, when they moved in together. Now they’re about to have an unscheduled break. M -
Blog postClaudia Hampton is writing a history of the world, and of herself, but only in her head. Lying in a hospital bed, she is visited by memories of a rich and vivid life, beginning with scrambling up a cliff on a Dorset beach as a child in 1920. Narcissistic to the core, she seems to prefer her dreams to the flesh-and-blood characters who sit intermittently at her bedside: her daughter, Lisa; Jasper, her former partner and Lisa’s father; Laszlo, her semi-adopted Hungaria
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Titles By Anne Goodwin
Becoming Someone: Short stories, light and dark, about identity and what makes us who we are
Nov 27, 2018
by
Anne Goodwin
$3.99
Other Formats:
Paperback
Underneath: A psychological suspense novel inside the mind of an ordinary man who keeps a woman captive in a cellar
May 25, 2017
by
Anne Goodwin
$3.99
Other Formats:
Paperback
Sugar and Snails: An unusual midlife coming-of-age novel shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize
Jul 23, 2015
by
Anne Goodwin
$3.99
Other Formats:
Paperback
