Overview

A Best Debut Novel of the Year (Daily Mail) - ""Raw and compelling"" 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 died after her return from an expedition in the jungle of Sri Lanka. Mysteriously 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.

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9781739778385

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Reviews

'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 '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

Author Information

Charlotte Beeston was born in Cheshire and grew up mainly in Kent. Further to a law degree at Exeter University, she worked as a solicitor for several years. In 2012 she obtained her Master's in creative writing from Birkbeck College, University of London, and won the Dissertation of the Year Prize. Her short stories have been published in the Mechanics' Institute Review and in Untitled Books online. She divides her time between London and Occitanie, in southern France, where she started writing The White Flower after the loss of her mother.

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