The Orange Notebooks by Susanna Crossman

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.