New release! A kaleidoscopic novel spanning generations and continents, that reveals the connections between four women all fighting for survival.
A woman in 15th century Ghana named Ada buries her child and confronts a Portuguese enslaver. A woman in Victorian England named Ada Lovelace, a mathematical genius based on the only child of Lord Byron, tries to hide her affair with Charles Dickens from her husband. A woman named Ada, imprisoned in a camp brothel at Buchenwald in 1945, will survive one more day. Connected by an unknown but sentient spirit, and a bracelet of fertility beads that each Ada encounters at a pivotal moment in her life, these women share a name and a fight.
As their interwoven narratives converge on a modern day Ada, a young Ghanian woman who finds herself pregnant, alone, in Berlin, searching for a home before her baby arrives, their shared spirit will find a way to help her break the vicious cycle of injustice.
This novel is a feat of imagination and breaks down simplistic notions of history as a straight line; one woman's experience matters to another's 400 years later, on a different continent. In this deeply moving, at times mordantly funny, ultimately hopeful book, there is a connection between all those fighting for love, for family, for justice, for a home.
By Sharon Dodua Otoo. Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi. Hardcover. 352 pages. Published by Riverhead Books, 2023.