Full Description
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. Anna
is haunted by the death of her only child, Lou.
After her son's death, Anna has a breakdown and is hospitalized. In the
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, 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, and the role of bees
because their wax made the candles that light the path of the dead. In the hospital Anna meets Yann, a Breton Sea
captain. Together, they go on an 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.
