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Gail Godwin Books In Order

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Publication Order of Margaret Bonner Books

Father Melancholy's Daughter (1991)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Evensong (1999)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

The Perfectionists (1970)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Glass People (1972)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Odd Woman (1974)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Violet Clay (1978)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
A Mother and Two Daughters (1982)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Finishing School (1984)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
A Southern Family (1987)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Good Husband (1994)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Evenings at Five (2003)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Queen of the Underworld (2006)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Unfinished Desires (2009)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Flora (2013)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Grief Cottage (2017)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Old Lovegood Girls (2020)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Dream Children (1976)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Heart (2001)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle

Publication Order of Biographies & Memoirs

The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961-1963 (2007)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Making of a Writer, Volume 2: Journals, 1963-1969 (2010)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir (2015)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Gabrielle: My Life As I Remember It (2021)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle

Publication Order of Best American Short Stories Books

The Best Short Stories of 1915 (1916)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1916 (1916)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1917 (1917)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1918 (1918)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1919 (1919)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1921 (1921)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1922 (1922)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1923 (1923)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1924 (1924)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1925 (1925)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1926 (1926)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1927 (1927)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1928 (1928)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1929 (1929)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1930 (1930)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1931 (1931)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1932 (1932)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1933 (1933)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1934 (1934)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1935 (1935)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1936 (1936)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1937 (1937)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1938 (1938)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1939 (1939)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1940 (1940)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories 1941 (1941)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1942 (1942)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1943 (1943)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1944 (1944)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1945 (1945)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1946 (1946)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1948 (1948)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1949 (1949)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1950 (1950)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1951 (1951)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1952 (1952)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1953 (1953)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1955 (1955)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1957 (1957)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1958 (1958)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1959 (1959)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1960 (1960)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1961 (1961)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1962 (1962)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1963 (1963)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1965 (1965)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1966 (1966)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1967 (1967)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1968 (1967)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories of 1969 (1969)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1970 (1970)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1971 (1971)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1972 (1972)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1973 (1973)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1974 (1974)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best of Best American Short Stories 1915-1950 (1975)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1975 (1975)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1976 (1976)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1977 (1977)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1978 (1978)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1981 (1981)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1984 (1984)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1985 (1985)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 1987 (1987)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties (1990)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 2001 (2001)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 2002 (2002)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story (2007)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories1921 (2007)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Best American Short Stories 2015 (2015)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Anthology series.

Publication Order of Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith Books

Listening for God Reader, Vol. 1 (By: Flannery O'Connor,Raymond Carver,Alice Walker,Garrison Keillor,Annie Dillard,Richard Rodríguez,Patricia Hampl,Peter Hawkins,Frederick Buechner,Paula J. Carlson,Peter S. Hawkins) (1994)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Listening for God, Vol. 2 (With: Anne Tyler,John Updike,Tobias Wolff,Henry Louis Gates Jr.,Kathleen Norris,Paula J. Carlson,Peter S. Hawkins,Carol Bly,Andrew Dubus) (1996)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Listening for God, Vol. 3 (By: Tillie Olsen,Wendell Berry,John Cheever,Louise Erdrich,Mary Gordon,Tess Gallagher,Reynolds Price,Oscar Hijuelos,Paula J. Carlson,Peter S. Hawkins) (2000)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Listening For God, Vol. 4 (By: Robert Olen Butler,Allegra Goodman,James Baldwin,Kent Haruf,SueMiller,Doris Betts,Paula J. Carlson,Peter S. Hawkins,MichaelMalone,Alice Elliot Dark) (2002)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Anthology series. The author will have written at least one story in this series.

Publication Order of Anthologies

The Writer on Her Work(1980)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Real Life: Writers from Nine Countries Illuminate the Life of the Modern Woman(1981)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Growing Up in the South(1991)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Listening for God, Vol. 2(1996)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
First Words: Earliest Writing from Favorite Contemporary Authors(2000)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Writers on Writing(2001)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas(2001)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
12 Short Stories and Their Making: An Anthology with Interviews(2005)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
FIRST WORDS: Earliest Writing from Favorite Contemporary Authors(2009)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
27 Views of Asheville: A Southern Mountain Town in Prose & Poetry(2012)Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle

Gail Godwin is a literary fiction, mystery, and historical fiction author that is best known for the “Margaret Bonner” series of novels.

The author was born in 1937 in Birmingham, Alabama but she moved with her newly divorced mother to Asheville North Carolina where she spent most of her childhood. In Asheville, her mother worked as a newspaper reporter, taught at two colleges, and wrote romance stories for pulp magazine to support the family.

At this time, Gail went to the Catholic school for girls St. Genevieve of the Pines and in fact, her 2009 published novel Unfinished Desires is inspired by her time there.

Her mother got married once again when she was eleven and the family moved a lot after that and Godwin changed schools a lot. When she graduated from high school she went to live with her father in North Carolina.
She would then attend the Chapel Hill-based University of North Carolina and Peace Junior College. While at Chapel Hill, she lost her father who took his own life and she memorializes him in Violet Clay as the character Uncle Ambrose.

Upon graduation from college, Godwin’s first employer was “The Miami Herald” which employed her as a journalist. It was there that she met Douglas Kennedy, a photographer that she briefly married.

According to the author, she only lasted at the Herald for a year since the publication’s editors found her stories too flamboyant. She was known for injecting too much human interest into what were supposed to be factual stories.
Thereafter, she went to live with her mother in London working for an American embassy-run travel service. For the most part, she was a glorified receptionist and she used to read a lot of books in secret.

It was while she was working at the embassy that she penned Gul Key, a novel that like many of her other works tells the story of a female trying to find her identity. The manuscript ultimately never went anywhere, even though it was not for a lack of trying.
Godwin would then go to the City Literature Institute where she studied creative writing. Following the breakup of her second marriage to Ian Marshal the psychiatrist, she moved back to the United States and began working for The Saturday Evening Post as a fact checker.

While her job as a fact checker put food on the table, she still had the desire of becoming an author. Things changed when a distant uncle of hers died and left her $5,000 as an inheritance. She used the money to enroll at the Iowa Writers Workshop which is where she met Kurt Vonnegut that would become her mentor and teacher.

At Iowa, she was a tutor even as she worked on her master’s and doctorate degrees. By the time she turned 30, she was the author of three manuscripts but could not get any published. Her very first success came when Cosmopolitan published one of her short stories in 1969.
Her first ever published novel was the work she wrote when she was studying for her master’s degree at the University of Iowa. “The Perfectionists” which was published in 1970 was loosely inspired by the author’s second marriage. It was bought by Harper and Row while she was still working on her graduate studies.

From 1971, Godwin taught intermittently but has asserted that she made the bulk of her earnings from writing.

“Grief Cottage” by Gail Godwin is a novel that touches the heart on so many levels. The lead in the story is Margaret Gower who lost her mother when she was six as she left her hometown in Virginia to go enjoy life with Madelyn her good friend.
As the wife of the Rector, her actions had caused tongues to furiously wag as Margaret was left to be raised by Walter her father.

The latter tried to put on a brave face following the separation as he believes Ruth will return when she tires of living out there. But a year later, Ruth dies in an accident and Margaret and Walter will have to make a new life for themselves without Ruth.
Walter is determined to never let Margaret grow bitter over the abandonment by her mother. This results in Margaret transferring her anger to Madelyn her mother’s friend. As Margaret grows older, she starts seeing things differently and lets herself move on.
It is a beautifully written and tender work that comes with a lot of detail that builds up a very realistic world for readers.

Gail Godwin’s novel “Father Melancholy’s Daughter” is a work set in a small North Carolina town of High Balsam during the latter part of the century.

The lead is the young pastor Margaret Bonner who heads the local episcopal church. She is very concerned about the tensions that have been rising between the recently laid-off workers and wealthy professionals.
The story opens one evening during the Advent season when Margaret opens her front door to find three strangers.

There is the 80-year-old monk Tony who just got off a Greyhound and needs a place to sleep for the night. There is the large and rude Grace Munger who will not stop talking about Gids Pan for the Millennial Birthday of Jesus.
Lastly is the alcoholic student Chase Zorn who was expelled from her husband’s reform school and now needs a place to stay.

Each of the visitors tells her that they will not be staying for long. However, they end up staying for months resulting in a lot of frustration for everyone. Nonetheless, they bring to Margaret a sense of family sweeter than anything she could have ever imagined.

“Evensong” by Gail Godwin is the story of Marcus an eleven-year-old that is sent to live with his great aunt on a South Carolina island following the death of his mother.

His aunt Charlotte is a reclusive painter who has a dark secretive past and is known for being a woman of few words. She tells him that she had been visiting a ruined cottage that she then pointed out as it matched the ruined state of her life.

It was from the state of the cottage that she got the inspiration to become a painter as she intended to capture the pure desolation. The residents of the island refer to it as Grief Cottage since a couple and their son had gone missing from it during a huge storm half a century earlier.

Marcus starts visiting the cottage every day while his aunt paints but has never gone inside. Slowly he is gathering courage and becomes very curious about the ghost of the boy that had gone missing from the cottage.
Soon enough he is courting the boy’s ghost even though it is not clear if the ghost has a sinister agenda or is just being friendly.

Book Series In Order » Authors » Gail Godwin

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