Clara’s Verdict
I first heard about Love in Colour at a literary festival, from a colleague who pressed it into my hands and said simply: read it on a long train journey. I eventually listened on an overnight coach from London to Edinburgh, and she was right. Bolu Babalola’s debut collection is the kind of book that makes you want to immediately hand it to someone you love.
A Sunday Times bestseller published in 2020, this is a short story collection that retells love myths from West African, Greek, Middle Eastern, and other traditions, placing Black women at the centre and stripping away the misogyny that tends to cling to the original sources. The result is something that feels simultaneously ancient and urgently contemporary.
About the Audiobook
Published by Headline and running 8 hours and 37 minutes, the collection covers a remarkable range of source material. Babalola moves from Yoruba and Ashanti mythology to Persian legends to tales from ancient China, and each story finds a different register: some are set in the deep past, others in recognisably modern offices or Instagram-era Lagos. The connective tissue is always the same: women navigating love, power, and self-possession with intelligence and humour.
What the synopsis undersells is how genuinely funny the book is in places. Several of the contemporary retellings have a sharp, witty rhythm that sits alongside the more tender mythic stories with considerable grace.
The Narration
Ajjaz Awad narrates the collection, and her performance is one of its genuine pleasures. She shifts registers effortlessly across the different cultural settings and time periods, giving each story its own texture without ever letting the voices feel mannered or overdone. Listening to her deliver the more comedic contemporary pieces and then pivot to something tender and mythic in the next track is genuinely impressive. The collection is well served by a single narrator rather than a cast, because Awad’s consistency gives the whole collection a sense of unified authorial voice.
What Readers Say
UK listeners have been consistently enthusiastic. One reviewer, Chiebuka, praised Babalola for centring women and eliminating the misogyny that lines most folktales. Alexandra C Sheppard called it a total treat and highlighted the range of mythologies: the focus on Yoruba, Ashanti, Chinese, and Persian sources rather than the more obvious Greco-Roman canon. The one dissenting voice, from Pamela Scott, is worth noting: she expected something really special and felt the collection fell short of its considerable advance reputation. That tension between word-of-mouth expectations and individual experience is real, and worth calibrating against your own appetite for short fiction.
Who Should Listen?
Anyone who loves mythology, short fiction, or stories that place Black women at the centre of their own romantic destinies. It is particularly good for listeners who have found traditional myth collections frustrating or exclusionary. Listeners expecting a single sustained narrative rather than a collection should recalibrate, but within its form this is an exceptional debut that earns its bestseller status.
