Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold
Bolu Babalola
About the Author
Author photograph ? Folaju Oyegbesan
Bolu Babalola is a British-Nigerian woman with a misleading bachelor’s degree in law and a masters degree in American Politics & History from UCL. She feels it is important to state that her thesis was on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and she was awarded a distinction for it. So essentially she has a masters degree in Beyoncé. A writer of books, scripts and retorts, a lover of love and self-coined ‘romcomoisseur’, Bolu Babalola writes stories of dynamic women with distinct voices who love and are loved audaciously. She is a big believer in women being both beauty and the beast. She can be found tweeting far too much @BeeBabs.
Praise for Love in Colour:
‘Perfection in short story form, I am in love with every single word Bolu Babalola has written. So rarely is love expressed this richly, this vividly, or this artfully.’ Candice Carty-Williams
‘Oh but Bolu Babalola is clever. Her collection of reimagined fairytales and classic stories is a true delight. Every story, every page is overflowing with wonderful words and sensational sentences. She finds the perfect new twist for every story that you think you know. My spine actually tingled more than once. Love in Colour is a joyful, brilliant collection that you’ll want to read again and again.’ Dorothy Koomson
‘Full of life and character, it’s such a pleasure to take this ride through history, geography, legend and lore in the company of a writer as witty and intelligent as Bolu. Her romantic sensibility is second to none.’ Bethany Rutter
‘Inventive, intimate, witty and wise, Babalola’s irresistible explorations uplift you from the start. Here is love as freedom, love as deep joy. Romance will never be dead, as long as she’s writing it.’ Jessie Burton
‘Bolu Babalola writes with a lightness of touch that gets to the heart of what it means to be human, to be in love and for love to never be as easy as it is in the movies. These stories are by turns funny, sad, magical, human, filled with heart and utterly unforgettable. This is a talent to watch, someone who understands that the best writing is about people, and the people who live in these stories will stay with you for a long long time.’ Nikesh Shukla
‘The entire book plays like a beautiful song with each individual story being a carefully chosen melody.’ Kelechi Okafor
‘Richly imaginative, unashamedly romantic and a total pleasure to read. I didn’t want it to end.’ Alexandra Sheppard
‘Love in Colour feels like a fresh reminder of the universality of love as a language, of love as a force that transcends time, place, culture and everything in between. Each story showed love in a new light, shone sometimes through stories that I recognised, other times through stories that I didn’t, but they were all stories that I felt.’ Ore Ogunbiyi
About the Book
A high-born Nigerian goddess feels beaten down and unappreciated by her gregarious lover and longs to be truly seen.
A young businesswoman attempts to make a great leap in her company and an even greater one in her love life.
A powerful Ghanaian spokeswoman is forced to decide whether to uphold her family’s politics, or to be true to her heart.
Whether captured in the passion of love at first sight, or realising that self-love takes precedent over romantic connection, the characters in Babalola’s vibrant stories face up to and navigate this most complex human emotion and try to capture its intangible essence. Bolu takes a step in decolonising tropes of love and creates new stories inspired by the wildly beautiful and astonishingly diverse tales of romance and desire that already exist in so many communities and cultures.
Transporting us across continents and perspectives, this collection shows that humanity – like love – comes in technicolour.
To my parents, who taught me love,
To my God, who is love,
To my love.
Introduction
To say that I love ‘love’ would probably be akin to me saying that I am quite fond of inhaling oxygen. Love is the prism through which I view the world. I truly believe it binds and propels us. This isn’t a naive denial of the darkness that we know exists in the world, rather it is a refusal to allow the devastation, the horror or the heartache to consume us. It is affirming the knowledge that there is light. Love is that light. Romance sweetens the casual bitterness we can encounter; it heightens the mundane and makes the terrestrial supernatural. The time it takes for two pairs of lips to meet could be milliseconds, but it can feel as if time has stretched indefinitely; you are transposed into a different world, your own world; just for you and the one who holds your affection. It makes you uniquely aware of both your body and spirit, it grounds you and it raises you up. Love enriches the world we inhabit.
In this book, I have had the honour and privilege of exploring how the power of love has been expressed within a variety of cultures from around the world. I pay homage to the textures of each original tale while also adapting them to fit a new, modern age. In doing this, I hoped to draw out and excavate what these stories can teach us about ourselves and love itself. My personal mission was to highlight how love and affection is magnificently multi-dimensional, both universal and deeply personal, its expression as nuanced, diverse and complicated as humanity itself.