Marala, Mother of Fairy Tales

Marala, the oldest woman in the world, lives during an ancient time, a time before all time. She lives with the birds and the animals, the trees, the winds, and the thunder. She speaks their language, she converses with them, she murmurs to them. In her long, long hair birds build their nests. In the hollows of her braid, new birds are born and seeds turn to flowers. Marala lives with them in happy coexistence, in a world where everything has its place. She sees, listens, touches, smells, tastes, kneads, bakes, and sings. Her relationship with the world is unmediated, pure. When one day a girl arrives, breaking the ice on her wooden surf board, Marala starts telling her stories. The girl decides to put them down, so that they are not forgotten. She thus finds a way to “write” them down – her very own way. And then she travels with them, under all weather, to every place imaginable. Before the advent of clay and styli, before marks were invented by scribes, a girl listening to fairy tale stories invents her own type of “writing”, the oldest, the very first writing there’s ever been. This is a story about the world’s very first woman, about the world’s very first age. A story about the transition from oral traditions to the first written traces of language. A story about stories. The stories produced by Marala and handed over to the girl. A story written in the oldest of materials: words and sentiments. A magically written story. A fairy tale-like story... Illustrated exquisitely by Katerina Hadoulou. It is a story for the young and the old alike.