A kaleidoscopic novel spanning generations and continents, that reveals the connections between four women in their struggle for survival. A woman in 15th century West Africa named Ada buries her child and confronts a Portuguese enslaver. A woman in Victorian England named Ada Lovelace, a mathematical genius and computer programming pioneer, tries to hide her affair with Charles Dickens from her husband. A woman named Ada, imprisoned in a concentration camp at Mittelbau-Dora in 1945, will survive one more day in enforced prostitution. 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 purpose. As their interwoven narratives converge on a modern day Ada, a young Ghanaian 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.
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“An impressive and highly original work, brimming over with energy.”
— Times Literary Supplement (London)
“A rule-shattering novel about the presentness of the past.”
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Sharon Dodua Otoo is the winner of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and was the Schroeder Writer-in-Residence at the University of Cambridge in 2022. She is active with the Initiative Schwarze Menschen and is affiliated with the Black queer feminist association ADEFRA. A writer and activist born in London, she lives in Berlin and writes in German.