The Orange Notebooks

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By (author): Susanna Crossman

Told through a mother’s journals written while interned in a French psychiatric ward, this is a novel about love, and the lost language and rituals of mourning.

The siesta hour, France. Bees fly in lavender bushes. Anna has just come home, but something is wrong. She fears nothing will ever be right again.

Following her son Lou’s death, Anna has a breakdown. Once hospitalized, Anna becomes determined to undo death by writing everything down in a set of orange notebooks: fragments and tales about her London childhood, the story of her relationship with Lou’s Basque father, Antton, their meeting on a ferry on the day Princess Diana died, Anna’s consequent obsession with the English Channel, a cursed trench coat, the duplicity of beige, Lou’s Jewish and Basque heritage, death rituals, and the role of bees—because their wax makes the candles that light the path of the dead.

In the psychiatric ward, Anna meets Yann, a Breton sea captain. Together, they go on a surreal Orphic journey to the underworld, sailing from Finistère to the middle of the English Channel, to try and find Lou at the exact point where his destiny began. Myth and reality collide, allowing Anna to journey through grief to radical hope.

AUTHOR

Susanna Crossman

Reviews

Praise forThe Orange Notebooks

The Orange Notebooksis stunning and luminous a story that cuts back and forth in time to uncover the mysteries of Annas passion and grief In lovely and intrepid writing Susanna Crossman has given us a fiercely observed novel of shimmering beauty and loss a deeply affecting meditation on ways that love can transcend unspeakable sadnessLuanne Rice author ofThe Shadow BoxandLast Day

Susanna Crossman brings a poets sensibility and great wisdom to her examination of a mothers grief on the loss of her young son Lyrical moving and masterful this book at its heart is about lovefor those who know us well for those we hold most dearand how we manage when that love is lostRachel Cantor author ofHalfLife of a Stolen Sister

Praise for Susanna Crossmans Previous Work

Vivid and poignant A powerful memoir of a particularly unusual childhood Concrete disturbing and movingThe Observer

Vivid and painfully honest Painful to read but so beautifully done Theres something of the Levy sensibility here Its serious and poetic Its delicate and wise Its a multilayered excavation a rich but also careful unfolding of the truthSunday Times

In the changing waters of memory Susanna Crossman navigates between cosy mystery and Gothic novel in a spooky debut book on the class struggleGladys MarivatMonde des Livres Le Monde

Served by a precise and sharp language this first novel delivers a fairly revealing portrait of English society between disillusions excesses and withdrawal into oneself An author to follow without a doubtAlibi Magazine