The Orange Notebooks

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.

Susanna Crossman grew up in an international utopian community in England during the 1970s and 80s. Now based in France, she works internationally as a writer, clinical arts therapist, and lecturer. Her recent writing has featured in Aeon, the Paris Review and Berfois. She is a published novelist in French, and her first book in English, Home Is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream, was published in the UK by Penguin/Fig Tree in 2024. She lives in Brittany, France with her partner and three daughters.