Susanna Crossman, "The Orange Notebooks"

 

Susanna Crossman is an essayist and award-winning fiction writer. The Orange Notebooks, her first English language novel, is out with Bluemoose Books (UK) and Assembly Press (North America) in 2025. Her acclaimed memoir, Home Is Where We Start: Growing up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream, was published by Fig Tree, Penguin, in 2024. She has recent work in Aeon, The Guardian, Paris Review, Vogue and more. A published novelist in France, she regularly collaborates with artists. When she’s not writing, she works on three continents as a lecturer and clinical arts-therapist. A Hawthornden Fellow, in 2025 she is a writing resident at Hosking Houses Trust. Born in the UK, Susanna Crossman grew up in an international commune and now lives in France.

About The Orange Notebooks, by Susanna Crossman
Told through a mother’s journals written while interned in a French psychiatric ward, The Orange Notebooks is a novel about love, and the lost language and rituals of mourning. 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: tales about her London childhood, her relationship with Lou’s Basque father, Antton, their meeting on a ferry on the day Princess Diana died, 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.

You can read more about The Orange Notebooks on the author's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The Orange Notebooks

My little buba, are you taking notes from this book as I write, are you using a keyboard or a pen? Buba, if you are reading these sentences, draw the boat. Add Yann, the boatman. Add your papa, he is calling your name. 

An ancient Japanese philosopher believed that somewhere there was a library, containing archives of all the words, in all languages: slang, literary, polished, idiomatic, and technical texts; manuscripts, scrolls, bestsellers, and brochures, pamphlets, and recordings, hardbacks, letters, and lists. Carefully preserved and classified, there are songs, slogans, and film scripts, jokes, and sermons. Diatribes and cartoons, myths and dreams. 

When I have finished transcribing my notebooks, I will walk through these library doors and seek out the Department for Miscellaneous: Lost Souls. In an aisle, marked Diverse Orange Documents of Differing Dimensions, I will place my notebooks on a shelf. 

I will tell the bees where I have left the orange notebooks; I will whisper it inside the hives. Politely, I’ll ask them to give you the message, to fly to you, buba, on the other side. Bees’ role in connecting flowers and pollination outweighs the importance of their honey chores. A third of crops rely on insect pollination. The bees must be kept alive to connect, pollinate, and deliver words. Survival is about communication and links between things, networks, alliances: pollen, bees, love, and flowers, beige and boys. 

My buba, are you walking along the library corridors? Have the bees dropped sweet nectar into your ears? On your tongue? Are your hands touching spines, seeking out titles and authors? Have you selected a book? Do your eyes look through each page? Are you reading me, reading these notebooks in the library? Louis, I am trying to show you a way home.