by Charlotte Beeston

Published: 27 November 2024 - special pre-order offer till publication date

Stella is turning 30 and lives alone in an apartment on the banks of the Thames in south-east London.  Her mental health has unravelled after her mother’s death from cancer, leaving her unemployed and isolated.
In Edwardian England, Julia is surrounded by friends but longing for solitude. She is mourning her elder daughter, a young photographer who has mysteriously died after her return from an expedition in the jungle of Sri Lanka.
Julia and Stella’s stories are obliquely linked across space and time beyond their respective loss. The White Flower charts the ebb and flow of the grieving process, explored through the prisms of memory, imagination and photography. In elegant, spare prose, Charlotte Beeston captures the impact of loneliness on the female psyche, and the permanence of love, art and friendship. The White Flower is her first published novel.

'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 Daughters of the House

‘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 Crossing

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

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