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. Charlotte Beeston’s debut charts the ebb and flow of the grieving process, explored through the prisms of memory, imagination and photography. In elegant, spare prose, The White Flower captures the impact of loneliness on the female psyche, and the permanence of love, art and friendship.