Published in 2021
12 hours and 32 minutes
Nigerian American and based in Sweden, Lola Ákinmade Åkerstrom is an award-winning author, speaker, and photographer. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, BBC, CNN, the Guardian, Sunday Times Travel, the Telegraph, New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Slate, Travel Channel, Adventure Magazine, and Lonely Planet, amongst others. In addition to contributing to several books, she is the author of the following books: Due North, a 2018 Lowell Thomas Award winner for best travel book, and the bestselling LAGOM: Swedish Secret of Living Well, available in eighteen foreign language editions. She has been recognized with multiple awards for her work, including the 2018 Travel Photographer of the Year Bill Muster Award, and she was honored with a MIPAD 100 (Most Influential People of African Descent) Award within media and culture in 2018. Her photography is represented by National Geographic Image Collection. Lola is also the editor of Slow Travel Stockholm, an online magazine dedicated to exploring Sweden’s capital city in depth.
What is this book about?
A timely and arresting debut novel about what it means to be a Black woman in the world. Perfect for fans of Queenie and Americanah.
Three Black women building new lives in Stockholm become linked in unexpected ways to the same influential white man.
Successful marketing executive Kemi Adeyemi is lured from the U.S. to Sweden by Jonny von Lundin, CEO of the nation’s largest marketing firm, to help fix a PR fiasco involving a racially tone-deaf campaign. A killer at work but a failure in love, Kemi’s move is a last-ditch effort to reclaim her social life.
A chance meeting with Jonny in business class en route to the U.S. propels former model-turned-flight-attendant Brittany-Rae Johnson into a life of wealth, luxury, and privilege–a life she’s not sure she wants–as the object of his unhealthy obsession.
And refugee Muna Saheed, who lost her entire family, finds a job cleaning the toilets at Jonny’s office as she works to establish her residency in Sweden and, more importantly, seeks connection and a place she can call home.
Told through the perspectives of each of the three women, In Every Mirror She’s Black is a timely, richly nuanced novel that touches on important social issues of racism, classism, fetishization, and tokenism, and what it means to be a Black woman navigating a white-dominated society.
