Mourning Dove by Claire Fullerton

Mourning Dove by Claire Fullerton

If Millie Crossan doesn't know anything else, she knows this one truth simply because her brother Finley grew up beside her. Charismatic Finley, eighteen 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 tenth 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?

"An accurate and heart-wrenching picture of the sensibilities of the American South." Kirkus Book Reviews

I’ve always known I'm a storyteller. Having been born in Wayzata, Minnesota (the homeland of my father) and transplanted at the age of ten to Memphis, Tennessee (the homeland of my mother,) I learned early that the art of observation can be an acclimating lifesaver. My mother told me that as a child, I would sit and watch people. I was thirty years old the first time she said this, then she added: "You still do.” If what is known as “the writer’s eye” is the ability to see the world from the outside in, then I am happily guilty.

Although I now live in Malibu, California, I'll always consider myself a Southerner: a card-carrying member of the last romantic culture on earth. When I was growing up, Memphis was a hot-bed of social and cultural change. In this atmosphere, I embraced popular music, for the city that sits on the bluff of the Mississippi is a musical mecca, and I wanted to be in its middle. I found my niche in music radio as a member of the on-air staff of five different stations, during a nine- year career.

My third novel is titled Mourning Dove. It's a sins-of the-father, Southern Family Saga, set in 1970's and 1980's Memphis. It was published by Firefly Southern Fiction in June of 2018, and to date, has won five book awards.