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. Carole worked as a journalist, including for washingtonpost.com and the New York Times, for some 15 years before moving to the UK, where she is now the head of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton. Her early years as a local journalist in Connecticut was influential in the writing of this novel, as was her perspective as an American ex-pat living in the UK. Her short fiction has been longlisted in the BBC’s National Short Story Award and published in Mslexia.
