Sometimes the most beautiful things grow in the hardest places

Flowers Grow Here Too

The series

A story about breaking cycles, finding yourself, and realising that where you started does not get to decide where you end.

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Carla May

A girl who was never given permission to become anything at all.

She learned early how to be small, how to read a room before she entered it, how to carry a house on a child's back. This is the story of the years it took to put that weight down.

Carla May writes the parts most stories skip. The quiet damage, the loyalty that costs too much, the friendships that arrive late and save everything, and the slow unglamorous work of becoming a woman who no longer flinches. Nothing here is tidied up for comfort, and nothing is left without hope.

A survival story told from the inside, without pity
Complicated characters who are never only one thing
The first book in an ongoing series

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Paperback and ebook. Book club and bulk orders are handled directly by Carter Stories Publishing.

Five stages of one long becoming

The book moves the way survival actually moves, one small refusal at a time. Open any stage to see where it goes.

Stage one

The concrete

A childhood that explains her and asks nothing. She learns the rules of a house where love arrives with conditions attached, and she learns them well enough to survive it.

Stage two

The crack

One ordinary day the story she was handed stops holding. It is not a rescue and nobody notices. It is only the first split in something that looked solid.

Stage three

The reaching

She tries on other people's lives to find out which parts fit. Some of it costs her. The friendships she makes here are the ones that stay.

Stage four

The bloom

Becoming is not a moment, it is a habit. She stops apologising for taking up room, and the cycle she was raised inside finally breaks at her feet.

Stage five

What comes after

The series carries on past the ending most books would settle for, into the harder question of what you do with a life once it is finally yours.

A raw and unforgettable story of survival, identity and becoming the woman she was never given permission to be.
Early praise for Flowers Grow Here Too

She writes the part of the story people usually keep to themselves.

Carla May is an emerging fiction author whose work explores the hidden parts of human experience, the wounds we carry, the relationships that shape us, and the strength we find on the way through.

Her writing is rooted in emotional storytelling and complicated characters, the kind who make the wrong choice for a reason you understand. She works from the belief that every person has a story underneath the surface, and that most of us are waiting for someone to ask about it.

Flowers Grow Here Too is the first book in her series, published by Carter Stories Publishing. She is writing the next one now.

Writing: Contemporary fiction, emotional and character led
Publisher: Carter Stories Publishing
Available: Paperback and ebook
Next: Book two of the series, in progress

The series

One woman, told across more than one book, because becoming does not finish in three hundred pages.

Out now

Flowers Grow Here Too

Book one. Survival, identity and the long walk out of a childhood that was never hers to choose.

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Book two

In progress. The story continues past the ending, into what she builds with the room she finally has.

Hear about it first

Book club guide

Discussion questions for groups reading book one, with notes from Carla on the chapters people ask about most.

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Stay for the next one.

Send a note about the book, a book club visit, an interview, or a review copy. For everything else, this is also where you tell Carla the part of the story that stayed with you.