Joanna Goodman Books in Order

Joanna Goodman grew up in Montreal, and that city, with its mixed histories, family loyalties, and uneasy borders between worlds, runs through much of her fiction. She writes about women at turning points, daughters carrying old stories, and people trying to build a life inside the inheritance their families give them.

She started early.

Goodman has said she wrote her first novel when she was nine, then kept starting novels throughout her teens, even writing blurbs for them as if they were already published. That mix of imagination and persistence still suits her career. Before her later bestseller run, she published short fiction and excerpts in journals such as The Fiddlehead, Event, The New Quarterly, White Wall Review, and B & A Fiction.

Her early novels, Belle of the Bayou, You Made Me Love You, and Harmony, are contemporary stories about women trying to sort out love, work, family, and identity. A betrayed wife heads to Louisiana. Three sisters realize adulthood has not turned out the way they planned. A new mother starts digging into the truth of her own childhood. Goodman was already interested in mothers and daughters, sister ties, humor with bruises underneath, and women who look fine until the pressure hits.

With The Finishing School, she moved into darker, more suspenseful territory. Set around an elite Swiss boarding school and a fall that may not have been an accident, it leans into secrecy, privilege, and the long shadow of adolescence. Then came The Home for Unwanted Girls, the novel that brought her widest readership. Set in 1950s Quebec and inspired in part by her mother's story, it follows Maggie Hughes and her daughter Elodie against the background of the Duplessis orphan scandal.

She stayed with that world in The Forgotten Daughter, which brings Elodie Phénix back alongside a love story shaped by Quebec separatist politics in the early 1990s. More recently, The Inheritance moves between Toronto and New York and follows a mother and daughter caught in a decades-long fight over a dead billionaire's estate. The setups change, but the pull is familiar. Goodman likes women who are boxed in by money, shame, history, or family expectation, and who have to decide whether they can still claim a life of their own.

Place matters in her books. Goodman has said that travel often unlocks stories for her, and you can feel that in the way Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, New York, a Swiss school campus, or a Louisiana detour do real work on the page. These settings are not just scenery. They shape the rules her characters have to live with.

Family is the engine.

Readers often come to Goodman for emotion, momentum, and the sense that private lives are always tangled up with bigger forces, class, language, politics, old wounds. She writes characters who make mistakes, want too much, hide things, and still stay recognizably human. Even when the plot turns on history or legal stakes, the deepest drama is usually inside the family.

Goodman now lives in Toronto with her husband and two kids. Outside her writing life, she also runs the family fine linens business her mother started in Montreal. That double life, business on one side, fiction on the other, feels close to the world of her books. Her novels understand the practical work of keeping a household or a family story together, and the emotional cost of doing it.