The Orange Notebooks

Told through a woman's journals written while interned in a French psychiatric ward after the death of her son, this is a novel about love, the lost language and rituals of mourning, and a journey through grief to radical hope.

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 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.