This autumn you can join author Carole Burns at Southampton independent book shop, October Books in Portswood, for the launch of her debut novel, The Same Country, about race and racism in America.
‘The Same Country is an electric, emotionally charged novel: it seethes with its own energy. Pick it up, and you won’t want to put it down.’ said Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan, and Albert & the Whale.
Fiction writer, journalist and Southampton associate professor Carole Burns will read from her debut novel, The Same Country, and talk to author Rebecca Smith about writing about race and racism in America on November 2nd.
The Same Country is a powerful and thought-provoking novel about family, friendship and the lengths we go to unravel the truth: 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, will the answers Cassie is so desperate to find cause everyone’s world to shatter?
Carole Burns is a freelance journalist for the Washington Post and an associate professor in Creative Writing at the University of Southampton. Her short story collection, The Missing Woman, won the John C. Zacharis Award from the prestigious U.S. literary magazine Ploughshares. Her non-fiction book, Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between, was based on her interviews with writers including Anthony Doerr, Andrea Levy, Colm Tóibín and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Rebecca Smith, as associate teaching fellow at the University of Southampton, was born in London and grew up in rural Surrey. From 2009 – 2010 she was the writer in residence at Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Hampshire. The Ash Museum was inspired by her time there and by being left hundreds of old family photographs and letters.
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