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, and she fears nothing will ever be right again.

Anna is haunted by the death of her only child, Lou. Hospitalized in a 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, the story of her relationship with Lou’s Basque father, Antton, and their meeting on a ferry on the day Princess Diana died, a cursed trench coat, Lou’s Jewish and Basque heritage, and the duplicity of the colour beige.

In the hospital, 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.