by Charlotte Beeston

Published: 28 November 2024

In contemporary and Edwardian London, two women are grieving the loss of a loved one. Stella, turning thirty, is increasingly isolated after her mother died of cancer; Julia, surrounded by friends, is longing for solitude as she mourns her daughter, a young photographer who succumbed to a mysterious illness after her return from an expedition in the jungle of Sri Lanka.
Connected across time and space by a haunting image, each explores, in her own voice, the complexities of the mother-daughter bond and family estrangement. From the banks of the Thames in present-day south-east London to the coast of East Devon and the Sri Lankan rainforest a hundred years earlier, Charlotte Beeston's delicate debut novel moves with aching lucidity between tenderness and raw emotion. Charting the ebb and flow of the grieving process, The White Flower captures the impact of loneliness on the female psyche, and the permanence of love, art and friendship.

See Paul Fulcher's five-star review on Goodreads.

'An ode to grief, Charlotte Beeston’s The White Flower renders the physicality of loss and yearning in prose so very exquisite.'
— Cauvery Madhavan, author of The Tainted and The Inheritance

‘Sensitively and tenderly written, The White Flower performs the mother-daughter bond as a loving tug-of-war between present and past, forgetting and remembering, loss and joyful reparation.‘ 
— Michèle Roberts, author of Colette: My Literary Mother

‘Charlotte Beeston's gorgeous debut novel, The White Flower, is a wonderfully intelligent and sensitively handled portrait of grief, how it leaves us obsessively circling the same moments, scenes and images. Literary in the best sense (language matters) the novel is full of incidental pleasures and deserves to be widely read.’
— Andrew Miller, author of The Slowworm’s Song

Paperback original with flaps
194 pages
180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-7397783-8-5

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