Claire Fullerton
DISCOVER SOUTHERN FICTION AT ITS FINEST
Claire Fullerton is a Memphis-born author, essayist, and speaker whose storytelling is as rich and layered as the landscapes of her Tennessee homeland. After adventurous years in Ireland and on the West Coast, Claire has returned to her Memphis roots, where she studies Shakespearean theatre and writes alongside her beloved rescue canine, Orla the Wonder Dog.
Novels, Novels, Novels!
Little Tea
One phone call from Renny to come home and “see about” the capricious Ava and Celia Wakefield decides to overlook her distressful past in the name of friendship.
For three reflective days at Renny’s lake house in Heber Springs, Arkansas, the three childhood friends reunite and examine life, love, marriage, and the ties that bind, even though Celia’s personal story has yet to be healed. When the past arrives at the lake house door in the form of her old boyfriend, Celia must revisit the life she’d tried to outrun.
As her idyllic coming of age alongside her best friend, Little Tea, on her family’s ancestral grounds in bucolic Como, Mississippi, unfolds, Celia realizes there is no better place to accept her own story than in this circle of friends who have remained beside her throughout the years. Their friendship can turn any life sorrow into a comic tragedy, and now that the racial divide in the Deep South has evolved, Celia wonders if friendship can triumph over history.
Dancing to an Irish Reel
While on sabbatical from her job in the Los Angeles record business, twenty-five-year old Hailey Crossan takes a trip to the west coast of Ireland , where she walks into the Galway Music Center and is offered a job too good to turn down. Friendships are formed quickly with her fellow, Irish employees, and Hailey lives thirteen miles "up the road" in the wind-swept, seaside area of Connemara, a land steeped in traditional music, where Irish is the first language. When Hailey meets a famous local musician named Liam Hennessey, a confusing relationship begins, which Hailey thinks may be the result of differing cultures, for Liam is married to the music, and although curious about Hailey, won't come closer nor completely go away. And so begins the push and pull of a relationship Hailey struggles to decipher as a stranger in a strange, and Hailey comes to love a land and its people with more heart and soul than she ever imagined, during a year that becomes the most pivotal of her life.
Mourning Dove
The heart has a home when it has an ally. If Millie Crossan doesn't know anything else, she knows this one truth simply because her brother Finley grew up beside her. Charismatic Finley, 18 months her senior, becomes Millie's guide when their mother Posey leaves their father and moves her children from Minnesota to Memphis shortly after Millie's 10th birthday.
Memphis is a world foreign to Millie and Finley. This is the 1970s Memphis, the genteel world of their mother's upbringing and vastly different from anything they've ever known. Here they are the outsiders. Here, they only have each other. And here, as the years fold over themselves, they mature in a manicured Southern culture where they learn firsthand that much of what glitters isn't gold.
Nuance, tradition, and Southern eccentrics flavor Millie and Finley's world, as they find their way to belonging. But what hidden variables take their shared history to leave both brother and sister at such disparate ends?
Mouring Dove (Audiobook )
Read by the author herself, Mourning Dove is over nine hours of spectacular audio drama, showing that the heart has a home when it has an ally. If Millie Crossan doesn't know anything else, she knows this one truth simply because her brother Finley grew up beside her. Charismatic Finley, 18 months her senior, becomes Millie's guide when their mother Posey leaves their father and moves her children from Minnesota to Memphis shortly after Millie's 10th birthday.
Memphis is a world foreign to Millie and Finley. This is the 1970s Memphis, the genteel world of their mother's upbringing and vastly different from anything they've ever known. Here they are the outsiders. Here, they only have each other. And here, as the years fold over themselves, they mature in a manicured Southern culture where they learn firsthand that much of what glitters isn't gold.
Nuance, tradition, and Southern eccentrics flavor Millie and Finley's world, as they find their way to belonging. But what hidden variables take their shared history to leave both brother and sister at such disparate ends?
A Portal in Time
When we are inexplicably drawn to love and a particular place, is it coincidence, or have we loved before? Enigmatic and spirited Anna Lucera is gifted with an uncanny sixth sense and is intrigued by all things mystical. When her green, cat-eyes and long, black hair capture the attention of a young lawyer named Kevin Townsend, a romance ensues which leads them to the hauntingly beautiful region of California's Carmel-By-The-Sea where Anna is intuitively drawn to the Madiera Hotel. Everything about the hotel and Carmel-By-The-Sea heightens her senses and speaks to Anna as if she had been there before. As Anna's memory unravels the puzzle, she is drawn into a past that's eerily familiar and a life she just may have lived before.
Claire Fullerton’s novels explore memory, place and the complexity of relationships. Little Tea, her acclaimed novel of female friendship and racial healing in the Deep South, became the Goodreads Book of the Month in July 2021, an August selection of the Pulpwood Queens Book Club, and racked up an impressive shelf of honors: a Faulkner Society finalist in the William Wisdom International Competition, first-place winner of the Chanticleer Review’s Somerset Award, a finalist in the International Book Awards, and both first-place Literary Fiction winner and second-place Book of the Year from the Independent Authors Network for 2020.
Her twelve-time award-winning coming-of-age saga Mourning Dove transports readers to 1970s Memphis in all its complicated glory, while the three-time award-winning Dancing to an Irish Reel draws on Claire’s own experience living among the music, mist and magic of Ireland’s west coast. Her debut novel, A Portal in Time — a paranormal mystery woven across two eras in the coastal village of Carmel-by-the-Sea—demonstrates her writing dexterity. She also contributed a novella to the anthology A Southern Season, set at a Memphis funeral (with all the drama that implies).
Beyond her novels, Claire’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She’s a four-time award-winning essayist whose work has graced the pages of Celtic Life International, Southern Writers’ Magazine, The Wild Geese, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. She is a five-time contributor to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and her short fiction has earned recognition in Southern Writers Magazine’s Best Short Stories for both 2015 and 2016. Her newspaper column, “In First Person,” was a readers’ favorite in the Malibu Surfside News. And Claire reviewed dozens of books for the New York Journal of Books.
Whether she’s creating stories about Southern womanhood, Irish landscapes or the ghosts that haunt beautiful places, Claire Fullerton writes with an unmistakable voice — warm, emotion-filled, and deeply rooted in the stories only she can tell.
Claire has returned to her Memphis, where she studies Shakespeare and writes alongside her beloved rescue canine, Orla the Wonder Dog.
About Claire
Watch Claire!
Much has been written about Memphis in the sixties, but a new coming of age story is set in the seventies and eighties, by a woman who lived this story in her own life with a life-changing move to the South. Claire Fullerton is the author behind "Mourning Dove."
The Beaufort chapter of the Pulpwood Queens Book Club hosted award-winning southern writer Claire Fullerton, author of Little Tea and Mourning Dove, in conversation in our Zoom room. Many thanks to Char M. Lane for hosting and organizing.
Listen to Claire!
Contact Claire
For book club visits, speaking engagements, press, or simply to share what one of the novels meant to you, Claire would love to hear from you.