Burns, Carole (2023) The same country , London. Legend Press, 308pp.
Abstract
'The Same Country' made the Best Welsh Fiction Books of 2023 list, published in December 2023 by the Wales Arts Review. Before publication, the opening pages of the novel were shortlisted in the 2022 Masters Review Novel Excerpt Award. There were 12 novels shortlisted out of 5,000 entries.
The novel was reviewed or featured widely in Wales, pieces that focused on The Same Country's incisive and sensitive treatment of race relations in Obama's America - mentioning how the novel precurses problems that have by now exacerbated. A review by two-time Wales Book of the Year Award winner Niall Griffiths stated: " 'The Same Country' (... the echoes of James Baldwin are self-reflexively alluded to) is a novel of webs, complexities, concatenations; it shows how the event of one murder remains alive in the memories of those ensnared in it (it’s a neat paradoxical inversion, that, and one of many throughout)...It’s a slow and considered and cogitative story with a frenzied heartbreak at its core. Much like most newspaper front pages in 2023."
It remains unusual for white American writers to grapple with racism in their fiction, as evidenced in Jess Row's book, 'White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination' (Graywolf, 2019), and this is one of the ways this novel treads new ground.
The Same Country received pre-publication endorsements from writers in the United States and the UK, including from author and Guggenheim fellow Gish Jen (‘The Same Country' unearths long-buried truths that remain the truths of America); Nation critic Gene Seymour (A romance, a detective story, and a coming-of-age novel all at once); Cameroonian writer Eric Ngalle Charles (The heart thrums with each sentence—a truly thrilling read) and Philip Hoare (A small-town America story of love and reverberating tragedy, with an interior voice that rivals Virginia Woolf's).
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