The Orange Notebooks

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.