Exciting news! CMF's backlist will soon be available in new editions. Subscribe to her newsletter, One Writer's Life, to receive notification when this latest project goes live. In the meantime, previous editions of her books can be found through IndieBound, your local independent bookstore, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. Her latest title, A MILLION FRAGILE BONES, can be found in bookstores everywhere.

SUGAR CAGE

"Within the first two pages, you know, without a doubt, that SUGAR CAGE is the genuine article. And that feeling stays with you to the last glorious page . . . . If writing is a gift, then Connie May Fowler must have been bestowed with the gift of ten muses. I'm amazed at the breadth of humanity she writes about, the uncanny way she captures the rhythm of inner lives: a reluctant seer of future tragedies, a disappointed wife, a Haitian caneworker, an abandoned young boy, a philandering but loving husband, a dying intellectual, a grieving widow and a merry one, a solder facing death, and a little girl who is haunted by the ghosts of her parents' past. She weaves this unlikely community of characters into a mesmerizing story, brimming with magic, humor, and always sympathy, showing us the characters' loneliness, their prejudices, and their circumstantial connections to one another. And just when we think that love and hope have failed them all, we realize we were wrong. They have been saved--only God and mambos know how--bound and uplifted by the same dream of humanity. And then we know what Connie May Fowler knew all along: this is a story about all of us."--Amy Tan

RIVER OF HIDDEN DREAMS

"Fowler returns to the wilds of Florida in her second novel, using cleverly alternating viewpoints ... to weave the lives of three generations of women into a tender and wistful story. Sadie is a middle-aged woman who lives on the small boat that she inherited upon her mother and grandmother's deaths when she was nine years old. Her life has little direction; between tumultuous visits from her passionate Cuban lover, Carlos, she leads wealthy tourists on boating expeditions in the Florida Keys, taking advantage of their captive ears to recount the family tales once told to her by her mulatto mother and her Native American grandmother . . . . Fowler settles into a comfortable rhythm that switches back and forth between the story of Sadie's vacillating relationship with Carlos and the stories of Sadie's forebears: tales about her grandmother Mima being kidnapped from the Oklahoma plains; about the illicit affair between Mima and Sadie's grandfather, Mr. Sammy; and about the angry silence between her mother and grandmother that ended only when her grandmother embraced her heritage. Sadie worries that her stories, rooted in imagination and mysticism as much as in memory, are tied only tenuously to reality. Where, she wonders, does history end and fabrication begin? The mummified body of a child that Sadie and Carlos find in the water after a storm prompts them to take action; the two navigate the winding rivers to St. Augustine in search of a suitable place to bury the child's body, and of a way to reconcile Sadie's future with her past. Though Sadie is unaccountably cranky, when she spins a yarn she weaves magic....in this memorable book." --Kirkus

BEFORE WOMEN HAD WINGS

"A nine-year-old narrator whose voice is heavy with sorrow, but who learns truths about the heart, is the focus of Fowler's deeply moving, triumphant third novel. The reader, too, learns lessons about a child's love for her parents, even when that child is the helpless victim of their physical and emotional abuse. Avocet Jackson, called Bird, lives with her parents, Billy and Glory Marie, and her older sister, Phoebe, in a roach-infested Florida shack. When Billy, a frustrated country music singer who has squandered his talent in booze, commits suicide, a desperate Glory Marie takes the girls to the outskirts of Tampa, where they move into a dilapidated trailer. Terrorized by her mother's alcohol-fueled rages, Bird is further confused by the fire-and-brimstone strictures of the Bible, which she takes literally. She feels that Jesus and the devil are battling for control over her life, and when her mother becomes more violent and calls her "a fat, lazy, lying sack of shit," she concludes that Jesus has spurned her. Fowler brilliantly conveys a child's bewilderment when the sources that should provide succor, parents and religion, instead inspire fear. Her depictions of physical violence?Glory Marie's beating at the hands of a man hired by her jealous husband, or her own brutal attacks on Bird and Phoebe spare no harrowing details. Fowler sweeps the narrative along with plangent, lyrical prose. Mixing the squalid details of Bird's life with the child's magical dreams of hope and healing, she has fulfilled the promise of her highly praised debut, Sugar Cage, and established herself as a writer of formidable talent."--Publisher's Weekly

REMEMBERING BLUE

"When starry-eyed Matilda Fiona O'Roarke (Mattie) meets burly, romantic Proteus Nicholas Blue (Nick), she's a clerk at a Tallahassee convenience store and he's working for a logging firm. He tells her he comes from a long line of rugged Greek-American fishermen who believe they're descended from dolphins and, as such, are destined to die at sea. Nick hopes to thwart fate, but when a fellow logger is killed on the job, Nick realizes that land is just as dangerous as water and returns with Mattie to his home on Lethe, the Florida coastal island his forebears settled. Initially, Mattie finds the extroverted Blue clan overwhelming, but her shyness disappears when Nick's widowed mother takes her under her wing. Soon Mattie is a fishmonger like Nick, and she learns more about the Blue family's heritage and their belief in myth. Nick is named for Poseidon's son, and the island recalls the mythological river of forgetfulness. Domestic traumas unfold, with Nick's black-sheep brother, Zeke, abandoning his teenage son to Mattie's care, while another brother, Demetrius, struggles with his infant son after his wife's desertion. Nick is strong and sensitive, a loving husband to Mattie, a man who cries when she reads him Hemingway and who saves the lives of stranded baby turtles and butterflies. Mattie is haunted by her own sad history of paternal abandonment and maternal neglect. She tries hard to be perfect, tending house, earning an accounting degree, harvesting vegetables and culling shrimp. When the inevitable Blue curse claims Nick, newly pregnant Mattie remains with the family she has come to love....The love story carries strong appeal, and Fowler's tender portrayal of Nick and Mattie's idyllic relationship will please romantics everywhere."--Publisher's Weekly

WHEN KATIE WAKES

"In this unique personal narrative, Fowler offers an eloquent look into the mind of a battered woman. Directly addressing her former abuser, she tells the story of their relationship and her gradual emergence from her own "self-loathing." A novelist with a poetic voice, Fowler (Remembering Blue) paints a rich, vivid portrait, by turns terrifying, haunting, gritty, dreamy and starkly rational. Snapshots of her evolving inner life flow into one another in an intimate montage. Heartbreakingly honest about the naive wishfulness that keeps her with a monstrous boyfriend, she writes, "When you tell me you'll turn me into a writer, that we'll pen movies together and live in Hollywood, my foolish hopefulness gushes like an opened vein." Her deep need to save this violent drunk stems from her past, when she nursed her abusive mother as she died a slow, ugly, alcoholic death. In the midst of Fowler's transition from childhood to her relationship with her abusers to her new, healthier existence, she agonizes, 'Which person is the real me? The young professional? Or the cowed little girl who has become a battered woman?' Ultimately, she completed her inner transformation and left the relationship, accompanied by her faithful dog Katie. Fowler's extraordinary memoir unlocks the secret inner worlds of battered women, codependents trying to love addicts and everyone who's overcome a traumatic past and healed herself through love.--Publisher's Weekly

THE PROBLEM WITH MURMUR LEE

"This elegiac novel, chronicling the life and death of idiosyncratic Murmur Lee Harp, showcases Fowler's easy, loose-limbed prose and sympathetic eye for human fallibility. Murmur Lee, 35, owns a popular local rundown bar in a North Florida backwater called Iris Haven and is skilled in the use of potions and spells. After her only child dies and her husband runs away, she finally finds the man she thinks may be the love of her life, then mysteriously drowns in a local river. Fowler beautifully crafts the story of this woman's life through the eyes of her motley bunch of friends and through the spirit of Murmur Lee as she looks back at her past life. After Murmur Lee's death, Charleston Rowena Mudd, Murmur's childhood friend and a 'Self Loathing Southerner,' finds herself back home in Iris Haven, having dropped out of Harvard Divinity School. Also in town is Billy Speare, Murmur's last love, a writer who believes he's on the verge of bestsellerdom; Lucinda Smith, an angry, chain-smoking yoga teacher; Dr. Zachary Klein, who's mourning his wife, dead of breast cancer; and former marine turned transsexual Edith Piaf, mesmerized by the singer of the same name. Somehow, Fowler makes the disparate viewpoints and characters work, and the singular life of Murmur Lee Harp engagingly unfolds, as does the mystery behind her early death.--Publisher's Weekly

HOW CLARISSA BURDEN LEARNED TO FLY

"Florida novelist Clarissa Burden is suffering from writer’s block. She lacks no creativity when daydreaming up death scenarios for her philandering buffoon of a husband, but when it comes time to put fingers to keyboard, her mind is blank. However, on June 21, 2006 (the longest, hottest day of the year), Clarissa will encounter no less than a multitude of ghosts, a one-armed angel, a one-eyed man, a sexy young love interest, a dwarf circus, and a host of critters. Each one in some way will grant her the courage it will take to escape the dull monotony of her day-to-day existence and write a new story. As in Sugar Cageand Before Women Had Wings, Fowler lends magic and voice to the singular Florida landscape. In addition, this time she blurs the line between the written and the writer as we witness Clarissa’s brave discovery that the real truth is often the most risky tale to tell."--Booklist

A MILLION FRAGILE BONES

Fowler's novels, including Before Women had Wings and How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, are infused with autobiography and her love and gratitued for the vibrancy of Florida's land and sea, and the solace and inspiration nature provides. In her second memoir, she revisits her very own paradise, a simply refurbished shack on the Gulf Coast, where she thrived among butterflies, crabs, starfish, snakes, endangered sea turtles, dolphins, nurse sharks, bears, pelicans, and many other bird species, even a cougar. Over the years, in sunshine and storms, as she wrote, gardened, and helped protect this previous place, the wounds of past abusive relationships healed. When she remarried, her husband shared her deep joy in their teeming sandbar home, and life grew ever sweeter until April 20, 2010, and the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. The start before-and-after divide is embodied in the very structure of the book, as Fowler switches from lush and spellbinding descriptions and beautifully hones reflections to urgent journal entries chronicling the unfolding catastrophe. Fowler's elegy to her lost home and chronicle of BP's criminal negligence and teh toxic decimation of this coastal haven is uniquely intimate and affecting in its precise elucidation of this tragic, largely invisible apocalypse, offering powerful testimony to the unacceptable risks and profound consequences of reckless oil drilling.--Booklist