Claire Fuller Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Claire Fuller
Claire Fuller is a short fiction writer and a novelist. For her first degree she studied sculpture at Winchester School of Art. She started writing at the age of 40, after so many years of working as a co-director of a marketing agency. She’s got a Master’s (distinction) in Creative and Critical Writing from The University of Winchester. She lives near Winchester, England with her husband and this cat called Alan, and she’s got two grown children.

Claire’s short fiction has been published in various literary journals and shortlisted for prizes. “Baker, Emily, and Me” won the 2014 BBC Opening Lines competition, and “A Quiet Tidy Man” won the Royal Academy and Pin Drop short story award in 2016, and was included in the Pin Drop/Simon & Schuster anthology: “A Short Affair”.

Claire has taught writing on various short courses. She’s taught flash fiction at The End of the Road Festival, fiction at Arvon, and short story writing at Winchester Writer’s Festival and at Jane Austen’s House Museum.

“Our Endless Numbered Days” won the 2015 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. “Unsettled Ground”, a novel, won the Costa Novel Award in 2021 and was shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. “Swimming Lessons” was shortlisted for the Livre de Poche Prize in France and the Encore Prize for second novels. “Bitter Orange” was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Claire’s novels have also been translated into more than 20 languages.

“Our Endless Numbered Days” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2015. A mysterious and imaginative modern fairy tale.

1976. Peggy Hillcoat is just eight years old. She spends her summer camping with her dad, listening to her mom’s grand piano and playing her beloved record of The Railway Children. However her pretty little life is going to change.

Her survivalist dad, who’s been stockpiling provisions for an end which is definitely going to come soon, takes her from London off to a cabin in a remote European forest. It’s there that he tells Peggy the rest of the world has vanished.

Her life becomes reduced to a piano that makes music but no sound, this forest where all that will grows is just a means of survival. And this tiny wooden hut that is Everything.

“Swimming Lessons” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2017. Ingrid Coleman, disenchanted by the life that she has found herself in, pens letters to Gil (her husband) about the truth of their troubled and passionate marriage. She hides them, each one going unread, in the thousands of books that Gil’s collected through the years. Then she vanishes from a Dorset beach, leaving her dilapidated house by the sea, her two young daughters (Nan and Flora), and her husband.

Twelve years go by, and Gil believes he sees Ingrid from this bookshop window, however he has started getting older and his unlikely sighting is just chalked up to his senility.

Flora, who never once believed that Ingrid had drwoned, returned back home to care for her dad, and investigate her mom’s disappearance. However what Flora didn’t realize is that the answers to each of her questions have been hidden in the books surrounding her.

“Swimming Lessons”, smart and scandalous, holds this family up to the light, and exposing the mysterious truths of Gil and Ingrid’s turbulent marriage and the dangerous fault lines which remain.

“Bitter Orange” is the third stand alone novel and was released in 2018. Claire delivers a seductive psychological portrait, and a keyhole into the dangers of longing and just how far one woman might go in order to escape from her past.

From the attic of Lyntons, this dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them. Cara first, who is beautiful and dark, and then Peter, who’s serious and striking. The couple spends the summer of 69 in the rooms just underneath hers as Frances researches the architecture in the surrounding gardens. However she is distracted.

Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole which gives her access to her neighbors’ private lives. Peter and Cara, much to Frances’ surprise, are keen to get to know her. It’s the first occasion that she’s had anybody to call a friend, and before very long they’re spending each day together: drinking one bottle of wine after the next, having these lavish dinners, and smoking cigarettes until the ash piles up on the crumbling furniture.

Frances is rather dazzled. However while the hot summer lazily rolls on, it becomes much clearer that not everything is right between Peter and Cara. The stories that Cara is telling do not add up exactly, and while Frances gets entangled more and more in the lives of the hedonistic and glamorous couple, the boundaries between lies and truth, wrong and right, start blurring. Amid the decadence, one tiny crime brings on a much bigger one. It’s a crime so horrible that it’ll brand both of their lives forever.

“Unsettled Ground” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in 2021. What if the life that you have always known gets taken away from you in just an instant? What would you do in order to get it back?

Twins Julius and Jeanie have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with Dot, their mom, in poverty and rural isolation. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their sanctuary and their armor against the world. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes even kill) everything that they need for their sustenance.

However when Dot dies all of a sudden, threats to their livelihood begin to rain down upon them. At risk of losing it all, Jeanie and her brother have to fight to survive in this increasingly dangerous world while their mom’s secrets unfold, which puts everything that they believed they knew about their lives at stake.

Claire delivers a thrilling novel of hope and resilience, survival and love, which explores with dazzling emotional power just how the truths closest to us are often the toughest to see.