Real Claudia Charles

Flora Miles, a promising but struggling novelist in her thirties, plans to make a name for herself by writing the biography of her mother's distant cousin, Claudia Charles, recently lauded in her Times obituary as '...an early feminist, and one of the finest writers of prose of the twentieth century'. Finding herself pregnant by her lover, and harassed by her mother to give up her project, Flora struggles to achieve the task she has set herself. It seems that the more she unravels the secrets of her famous relative's life, the more her own sense of identity is called into question. When her mother dies leaving behind long-hidden diaries, Flora uncovers shattering truths about her family history, but from these revelations emerge, at last, the real Claudia, and ultimately the real Flora.