We are excited to be hosting the launch of The Same Country by Cardiff-based author Carole Burns. A powerful and thought-provoking story about family, friendship and the risks we take to unravel the truth, The Same Country tells the story of three women who are haunted by the shooting years earlier of their friend and brother, Joe Willis.

Twenty years ago, Joe was shot dead in the bedroom of his white girlfriend. It was deemed an accident, but now his friend Cassie – a journalist – is not so sure. As racial tension ignites a string of violence across their New England city, secrets are revealed, questions mount and suspicions grow. Will the answers that she is so desperate to find cause everyone’s world to shatter? The Same Country is a powerful and thought-provoking story about family, friendship and the risks we take to unravel the truth, inspired by Carole’s early years working as a newspaper reporter in Connecticut and her personal reflections on America as an expat.

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Carole Burns, a freelance reviewer for the Washington Post, was the winner of Ploughshares’ John C. Zacharis First Book Award in 2015 for her story collection, ‘The Missing Woman’. Her non-fiction book, Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings and Everything In Between, was based on interviews with forty-three authors including Colm Tóibín, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Anthony Doerr. Her short fiction has been longlisted in the BBC’s National Short Story Award and published in Mslexia. She is an American expat, who has lived in the UK for the last 15 years.  As well as writing novels at her home in Cardiff, she teaches creative writing as an associate professor of English at the University of Southampton.