The Orange Notebooks
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bluemoose Books Ltd
Published:22nd May '25
Should be back in stock very soon
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£12.00(9781915693341)
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 Orange Notebooks is a novel about love and hope. Told through a woman’s journals written while interned in a French psychiatric ward after the death of her son, Anna explores grief through the power of nature and mourning rituals where myth and reality collide allowing her to begin her journey of radical hope to love and acceptance.
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.
Anna is haunted by the death of her only child, Lou. After her son’s death, Anna has a breakdown and is hospitalized. In the psychiatric ward, Anna becomes determined to undo death by writing everything down in a set of orange notebooks: fragments and tales about bees, death rituals, 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, and the role of bees because their wax made the candles that light the path of the dead. In the hospital Anna meets Yann, a Breton Sea captain. Together, they go on an Orphic journey to the underworld, sailing from Finistère in his boat 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 begin the healing process.
“Rather than offering a linear journey from devastation to healing, Crossman presents something far more complex: an unflinching exploration of loss that refuses easy consolation… The result is a novel that functions as both literature and testimony—a map of terrain most hope never to traverse, drawn with remarkable clarity and emotional truth.”—Jonathan Crain
“A remarkable piece of writing… the author’s use of language is vivid and original.”—The Seaboard Review of Books
“The Orange Notebooks is surely a grand and noble effort. Parts of Anna’s story absolutely gut the reader. Many passages command an immediate re-read for the sole purpose and joy of savour. “—Winnipeg Free Press
“Beautifully told, heart-wrenching”—Bookmunch
“Crossman blends the intimate and the mythical in this moving exploration of motherhood, loss, and the fragile hope that love might bend the boundaries of death.”—Open Book
“The Orange Notebooks is stunning and luminous, a story that cuts back and forth in time to uncover the mysteries of Anna’s 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 sadness.”—Luanne Rice, author of The Shadow Box and Last Day
“Susanna Crossman brings a poet’s sensibility and great wisdom to her examination of a mother’s grief on the loss of her young son. Lyrical, moving, and masterful, this book, at its heart, is about love—for those who know us well, for those we hold most dear—and how we manage when that love is lost.”—Rachel Cantor, author of Half-Life of a Stolen Sister
ISBN: 9781915693266
Dimensions: 224mm x 142mm x 19mm
Weight: 301g
195 pages