White Flower

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.

'’This beautifully written narrative alternates between Stella’s contemporary story set in London and Julia’s Edwardian one, setin East Devon and London. Separated by time and distance, our two protagonists are both dealing with debilitating grief. Stella is in therapy, discussing the death of her mother, the emptiness she feels andhow she has no idea where to go from here. Julia is mourning her oldestdaughter, Helena, finding the loss unbearable and desperately seeking solitude. Stella’s mother died of cancer and she has pretty much no relationship with her distant father. Helena was a photographer who diedsoon after returning home from an expedition in the rainforests of Sri Lanka. Stella and Julia’s individual meditations on their deep losses combine to form an emotionally intelligent, thought-provoking portrait of grief and the mother-daughter bond. It’s raw and compelling and brilliant on letting life in and finding slivers of hope in the darkest situations. It stayed with me long after I finished it.’ -  Sara Lawrence, Daily Mail'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.' - Michele 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