A blend of Queenie and The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives with a healthy spoonful of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? will make you laugh as you cheer for a loveable heroine looking for love, and herself, between her two cultures. From the blog post that inspired her to Yinka’s abiding love for her local chicken shop, Lizzie Damilola Blackburn gives us five fun facts about one of the first Black British romantic comedies.
Lolá Ákínmádé Åkerström's fiction debut—an award-winning Nigerian-Swedish travel photographer and writer living in Stockholm—is a striking story. A unique distillation of commercial and literary fiction that feels like a tragedy, In Every Mirror She’s Black is an unputdownable read many have called “the perfect book club book”. It is preceded by the 2018 Lowell Thomas Award winner Due North and the bestselling LAGOM: Swedish Secret of Living Well. In this interview, Ákínmádé Åkerström talks freely about how In Every Mirror She’s Black upends mainstream ideas about Nordic society, her difficult journey to publication, and writing Black women.
Love in Colour transports you into a better world. It makes you question your definition of love. It challenges you to be loved loudly and unashamedly. This is clearly a writer who understands romance and it is evident just how much she loves love. Bolu wants readers to know that to love is to see and to be loved is to be seen: it is the action of acceptance, the acceptance of others and the acceptance of self.
Imagine the thrilling pacing of gripping genre fiction, the socio-political urgency of literary fiction and the sharp clarity of non-fiction, all thrown together to tell a story that has never been told before: the story of Black women in Sweden. Across class, career, and culture, Kemi, Brittany-Rae, and Muna experience Stockholm in vastly different ways relative to their Blackness but all three are, fundamentally, devastatingly lonely. Solitude is the real story of In Every Mirror She’s Black, a unique distillation of commercial and literary fiction that ultimately hits like a tragedy.
