Joanna Goodman
Books
The Inheritance
The new instant bestseller from Joanna Goodman
"Wise, immersive and full of the fierce vulnerability that links women together, The Inheritance reminded me of a Meg Wolitzer novel. With immediately engaging characters and a multilayered story that is, at its core, an ode to the deep complexities of being female and the powerful ties of family in all its forms, this is an unforgettable novel from a genuine talent."
– Marissa Stapley, New York Times bestselling author of Lucky
This sprawling Succession meets Bleak House story straddles past and present, moving from Toronto to New York City, in a poignant portrait of familial bonds, haunted pasts, the collateral damage of life choices, and the promise of a hopeful future as two venerable women fight for the life they deserve.
"Goodman’s novel delves into the toxicity of inheritance and the way it can obsess and destroy one’s sense of self and path in the world. She looks at the myriads of ways the women in the Bunt family hold themselves back, by focusing on appearance, by becoming love addicts, by denying abuse. Their struggle is cringey, complicated and a beautiful thing to behold. Goodman’s women are impossible not to feel empathy and cheer for. An excellent, compulsively readable work."
– Heather O'Neill, bestselling author of When We Lost Our Heads
Read Synopsis
Arden Moore enjoyed an affluent life thanks to her husband’s financial success as a Bay Street stockbroker, but a year after his unexpected death, the 36-year-old is a grieving single mother deeply in debt and living paycheck to paycheck with her three kids. Then, an unexpected call from a well-known estate lawyer in New York offers a glimmer of hope, setting in motion a complex legal journey that could mean the difference between a life of poverty, or unimaginable wealth thanks to the father she never knew, deceased billionaire, Wallace Ashforth.
Thirty years before, Arden’s mother, Virginia, a flirtatious love addict with a string of failed affairs, had an affair with Wallace that transformed her life. When he died in a plane crash without a will, Virginia fought for years in court to secure a comfortable future for her and the secret unborn daughter she shared with Wallace. Despite her best efforts, society and the legal system prevented her from receiving the money that should rightfully have been hers.
But now, with advances in DNA testing, Arden may finally succeed in claiming the inheritance she has been long denied.
The Forgotten Daughter
From the author of the bestselling novel The Home for Unwanted Girls, comes another compulsively readable story of love and suspense, following the lives of two women reckoning with their pasts and the choices that will define their futures.
The Forgotten Daughter is a moving portrait of true love, familial bonds, and persistence in the face of injustice. As each character is pushed to their moral brink, they will discover exactly which lines they’ll cross—and just how far they’ll go for what they believe in.
Read Synopsis
1992: French-Canadian factions renew Quebec’s fight to gain independence, and wild, beautiful Véronique Fortin, daughter of a radical separatist convicted of kidnapping and murdering a prominent politician in 1970, has embraced her father’s cause. So it is a surprise when she falls for James Phénix, a journalist of French-Canadian heritage who opposes Quebec separatism. Their love affair is as passionate as it is turbulent, as they negotiate a constant struggle between love and morals.
At the same time, James’s older sister, Elodie Phénix, one of the Duplessis Orphans, becomes involved with a coalition demanding justice and reparations for their suffering in the 1950s when Quebec’s orphanages were converted to mental hospitals, a heinous political act of Premier Maurice Duplessis which affected 5,000 children.
Véronique is the only person Elodie can rely on as she fights for retribution, reliving her trauma, while Elodie becomes a sisterly presence for Véronique, who continues to struggle with her family’s legacy.
#1 National Bestseller
The Home for Unwanted Girls
Philomena meets The Orphan Train in this suspenseful, provocative novel — the story of a young unwed mother who is forcibly separated from her daughter at birth and the lengths to which they go to find each other.
Read Synopsis
In 1950s Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility—much like Maggie Hughes’ parents. Maggie’s English-speaking father has ambitions for his daughter that don’t include marriage to the poor French boy on the next farm over. But Maggie’s heart is captured by Gabriel Phénix. When she becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents force her to give baby Elodie up for adoption and get her life ‘back on track’.
Little Elodie is raised in Quebec’s impoverished orphanage system. It’s a precarious enough existence that takes a tragic turn when Elodie, along with thousands of other orphans in Quebec, is arbitrarily declared "mentally ill" as the result of a new law that provides more funding to psychiatric hospitals than it does to orphanages.
Bright and determined, Elodie withstands abysmal treatment at the nuns’ hands, finally earning her freedom at seventeen, when she is thrust into an alien, often unnerving world.
Meanwhile, Maggie, married to a businessman eager to start a family, cannot forget the daughter she was forced to abandon, and a chance reconnection with Gabriel spurs a wrenching choice. As time passes, the stories of Maggie and Elodie intertwine but never touch, until Maggie realizes she must take what she wants from life and go in search of her long-lost daughter, finally reclaiming the truth that has been denied them both.
Reviews
"The novel centers around the definition, the challenges, the triumph of family, but it also acknowledges that Elodie and Maggie's story is one of many. The ending hits a perfect emotional note: bittersweet and honest, comforting and regretful."
— Kirkus Reviews
"Joanna Goodman has written a beautiful novel containing the entire range of emotions experienced by the human heart... This book is the story of Maggie and Elodie, but also the chilling story of so many Quebec children who were abused at the hands of nuns and priests when they had no one to advocate for them. Goodman handles this heartbreaking topic with grace and skill. The heartbreaking exists alongside the heartwarming here, and rather than seek to “solve” this dark moment in Canadian history or gloss over it, Goodman unpacks it and sits with it, looking for hope amidst the ruins. The result is beautiful and at times breathtaking.... This is the story of a girl, of love, and of family... If you are a fan of historical fiction, sweeping family epics, or a beautifully written page turner that will rip your heart in two and then melt it back together; this one is for you. The heart wrenching beauty of this novel is not one that is easily done justice in a review: I suggest you go see for yourself."
— The Required Reading List
for The Inheritance
"Canadian writer Joanna Goodman... brings the horrors and complexities of recent Canadian history to life with vivid, realistic characters. Readers will be spellbound."
— Starred Review, Publishers Weekly
"Goodman explores two major events in recent Canadian history and how each of these expose deep wounds in the country and its people. The characters, complex and flawed, love and fight so fiercely that it’s hard not to be drawn into their passionate orbits and to feel, even slightly, a glimmer of hope as they refuse to give up on the ideal of happiness."
— Kirkus Reviews
"In this captivating story layered with love, suspense, grief, and redemption, Goodman once again creates intriguing characters that will immediately draw readers in."
— Melissa Norstedt, BOOKLIST
"Duplessis Orphans Have an Advocate in Novelist Joanna Goodman"
— The Montreal Gazette
"Joanna Goodman, the Toronto author of The Finishing School, based this new novel in part on her own mother’s story — and you can feel that current of emotion running throughout it. The novel opens in 1950 in a small town southeast of Montreal, during the brutal Duplessis years, or “The Great Darkness,” a time of great tension between the English and French. Maggie Hughes, daughter of an English store owner and a feisty French woman, feels torn between these two worlds — until her love for a French farm boy neighbour forces her hand. Fifteen and pregnant, Maggie is shipped away to live with family, who ultimately take the baby to a convent, not knowing what will be in store for little Elodie in the coming years, as the orphanages are converted to mental institutions. A heart-wrenching saga of love and loss that’s not to be missed."
— The Toronto Star
"Goodman, the author of four previous novels including The Finishing School, does an exceptional job in The Home For Unwanted Girls of confronting a terrible past marked by history that is almost too shocking to comprehend, and in the process gives Maggie and Elodie something women at that time did not have, a chance for truth, happiness, and a chance at redemption. All of this makes The Home For Unwanted Girls an emotionally raw and a compelling page-turner that you can't put down."
— The Brooklyn Digest
"Told against the tumultuous political backdrop of 1950s Quebec is the story of Maggie, the daughter of a proper English family, becomes pregnant with the child of her first love, French neighbor Gabriel. Forced to leave Gabriel and the lower-class lifestyle he can offer her, Maggie is sent away to have the baby, who is given up for adoption so that Maggie can return to the respectable life that her parents envision. While Maggie makes an ill-fated attempt to live up to her parents’ wishes, her daughter, bright and inquisitive Elodie, grows up in a nearby orphanage until the law changes and all orphans are declared mental patients. Elodie endures life under the nuns’ cruel regime until her release into a foreign world at 17 years old. Only after Maggie and Elodie escape from the confines of their respective institutions can the family be reunited. While emotional at times, Goodman’s latest (after The Finishing School, 2017) is a study of how love persists through the most trying of circumstances. Deep and meaningful, this novel captures the reader’s attention..."
— Nicole Foti
"Joanna Goodman has written a beautiful novel containing the entire range of emotions experienced by the human heart... This book is the story of Maggie and Elodie, but also the chilling story of so many Quebec children who were abused at the hands of nuns and priests when they had no one to advocate for them. Goodman handles this heartbreaking topic with grace and skill. The heartbreaking exists alongside the heartwarming here, and rather than seek to “solve” this dark moment in Canadian history or gloss over it, Goodman unpacks it and sits with it, looking for hope amidst the ruins. The result is beautiful and at times breathtaking.... This is the story of a girl, of love, and of family... If you are a fan of historical fiction, sweeping family epics, or a beautifully written page turner that will rip your heart in two and then melt it back together; this one is for you. The heart wrenching beauty of this novel is not one that is easily done justice in a review: I suggest you go see for yourself."
— The Required Reading List
About the Author
JOANNA GOODMAN is the author of seven novels, including the new instant bestseller, The Inheritance, and the #1 national bestseller, The Home for Unwanted Girls, which was on the Canadian bestseller list for more than six months. Her other novels include The Forgotten Daughter and The Finishing School, both national bestsellers. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, B & A Fiction, Event, The New Quarterly, and White Wall Review, as well as excerpted in Elisabeth Harvor’s fiction anthology A Room at the Heart of Things. Originally from Montreal, Joanna now lives in Toronto with her husband and two kids.
Contact
Literary Agent
Samantha Haywood
Transatlantic Agency
2 Bloor Street East, Suite 3500
Toronto, Ontario
M4W 1A8
Canada
416-488-9214
sam@samanthahaywood.com