The Orange Notebooks
by Susanna Crossman
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Pub Date Sep 02 2025 | Archive Date Aug 28 2025
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Description
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.
Advance Praise
"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
Praise for Susanna Crossman's Previous Work: Home Is Where We Start: Growing up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream
"Vivid and poignant... A powerful memoir of a particularly unusual childhood... Concrete, disturbing and moving." —The Observer
"Vivid and painfully honest... Painful to read but so beautifully done... There's something of the Levy sensibility here. It's serious and poetic. It's delicate and wise. It's a multilayered excavation, a rich but also careful unfolding of the truth." —Sunday Times
"In the changing waters of memory... Susanna Crossman navigates between cosy mystery and Gothic novel, in a spooky debut book on the class struggle." —Gladys Marivat, Monde 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, withou ta doubt." —Alibi Magazine
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781998336197 |
| PRICE | CA$23.95 (CAD) |
| PAGES | 264 |
