The Orange Notebooks

The Orange Notebooks

Susanna Crossman

$23.95

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.

Read an excerpt and recommendation by Rachel Cantor over at Electric Literature!

Read an interview with Susanna Crossman at Open Book!

Praise for The Orange Notebooks

“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 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

Author

Susanna Crossman
Publication date

September 2, 2025
Print details

9781998336197 / Paperback / 5.5 x 8.5 / 264 pages
Ebook details

9781998336203 / DRM-free epub / Conforms to WCAG 2.0 Level AA
Rights

North America
Colophon

Printed in Canada by Imprimerie Gauvin (Gatineau, Quebec) using Sustana EnviroBook™ 100% recycled uncoated paper and cover stock milled near Montreal, Quebec.

Using one ton of Sustana EnviroBook™ rather than a virgin paper saves the equivalent of 24 trees, 1,773 gallons of water, and 3,399 lbs of greenhouse gas emissions.

from The Orange Notebooks by Susanna Crossman

1. We’ve Only Just Begun

I remember this: We’ve just got off the Channel ferry. On the motorway, we’re heading to London. In the backseat, you say:

“Mama! Mama! The wire things are round and then go straight.”

“Sorry, I can’t hear.” I overtake a yellow Spanish lorry, glare at the driver beeping his horn. “Speak up, buba,” I yell, tired from the overnight crossing. I didn’t sleep.

“Mama, the wire things!” you shout. “The wire things are round and then go straight!”

“Be quiet, buba. I am driving!”

A sports car with the number-plate LUV U is close behind me. The driver flashes his lights.

“But Mama, the wire things by the road…”

In the rear mirror, I see your small finger. From your car seat, it points to a pylon. By the road, the wires reach into the horizon. Heading out to nowhere, they seem to come from the sea. The past is behind us, I think, and wish I was still on the night boat, being cradled by the swell. Briny billows. Sailing into great waters— You interrupt my daydreams:

“Mama, the wires go round and then straight.”

Glancing up, I notice that from a distance, the curves dangle like crescent moons. As we approach, the wires seem to flatten into straight lines. In my mirror, the lines continue and then disappear.

“That’s an optical illusion.” I explain, because I am a mother and, buba, it is my job to give you instructions about the workings of life. I try to tell you the rules, about danger and love, and all the things we cannot see. “An optical illusion means things are different to how they appear. An optical illusion.”

“An illusion. An illusion,” you repeat.

I look up at a road sign. We’re sixty-three miles from London, yet already I can smell Edgware pollution and fried fish, and I feel the dry powder on my mum’s skin.

In the back of the car, you whisper, over and over again:

“Illusion… illusion… illusion.”

“Illusion” is an eighties song by the group Imagination. One of my mum’s favourite tunes. As I drive on the motorway, it echoes in my ears. The world is just an illusion.


It is June. Two years later. France. Early afternoon. I go to ring the bell. A bee flies past my ear, landing on the brass door handle. Six black legs. A quiver of fur. In my mind, thoughts swarm of nectar, of the honey cake my Aunty Deb baked, a bittersweet mouthful, swallowed and gone. For an instant, I wonder about bee-killing pesticides, bee stings, pain, and draw back my hand. In Europe, there are almost two thousand species of bees. I know they are under threat. Recoiling, I think of the movie Lou watched, hour after hour, as children do in the comfort of evermore. The film, Bee Movie, portrayed bees as humans: the bee mummies and bee daddies with two bee children. Bee mornings. Bee afternoons. Clean bee nights. Bee school. Bee work. Bee retirement. Bee conformity. Bee longings. Bee love and bee hate. This humanising of the natural world is an outrageous anthropomorphic act we must not forget. The bee world has its own mystery: bees are born. Bees die. The bees are dead. The bees are buzzing. The thoughts rattle inside me. I am an empty can. No filling. No stuffing. A mother with a dead child is no longer. A mother with a dead child is a joke.

Closing my eyes, I listen to the bees. They are flying through labyrinths of grey-green stalks, gathering pollen from pale mauve blooms. The scent of lavender coats the air. A slick veneer. The sudden heat of French summers. Siesta hour. Sweat trickles down my back; the drops draw damp lines. There is an orchestral stillness, a muffled silence I know well. It seems like an odd moment to i back, while the whole world is sleeping. As though everyone is waiting, and here I am. Finally, de retour with the lavender, the sunflowers and the fig tree in the garden. Even the cicadas seem to be resting; the only thing I hear is bees. Some legends say bees never sleep and they go on and on making honey.

(…)