Love Languages by James Albon
Two women fall in love across boundaries of language in James Albon's beautiful latest graphic novel
Two women’s nascent romantic feelings for one another elude description in James Albon’s Love Languages, a graphic novel set in Paris and painted in his signature mix of watercolour and gouache.
High-powered Londoner Sarah’s chance meeting with Ping, an au pair from Hong Kong, shakes her from the grind of her impenetrable corporate job. The pair meet up in parks and cafés under the guise of language learning: a chance to practise their French, English and Cantonese. Gradually, though, Sarah realises that, even as she improves, none of the languages feel sufficient for describing her unexpected bond with Ping.
Through sprawling double-page spreads that seem to owe as much to the old masters as they do classic New Yorker covers, we follow Sarah as she discovers sides of Paris and herself for the first time. As the dual confines of the office and her mother tongue fall away, so too do her preconceptions about herself. But squaring these newfound realisations with the life she has spent years building proves another challenge entirely.
With 2021’s The Delicacy, about two brothers in self-destructive pursuit of culinary renown, Albon showed his knack for contrasting bustling scenes with interpersonal drama. But where his previous work hinged on deeply buried secrets, Love Languages pares back the melodrama in search of something more grounded. Albon’s quietly innovative graphic novel manages to turn a trilingual queer romance into a universal story of self-discovery.
