Ada's Room
A Novel
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- 4,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Otoo (Synchronicity) tracks a woman through many reincarnations and across centuries and continents in her clever if meandering latest. Readers first encounter Ada in 1400s Ghana, where she grieves the loss of her infant. Next, Ada's a mathematician in 19th-century London, where's she's addicted to gambling and carries on an affair with Charles Dickens. During WWII, Ada is sent by the Nazis to a concentration camp and forced to work in a brothel. In each of her lives, Ada receives the same mystical beaded bracelet, which figures each time into her death at the hands of a man (in Victorian England, it's her wedding bracelet). Before each iteration, an unnamed angellike narrator tries to prevent Ada from meeting a similar fate as the last, reminding her, "all beings—past, present, and future—are connected," but Ada always forgets. Taken together, the early accounts of Ada feel a bit scattershot, but Otoo hits her stride after introducing the final version of Ada, pregnant and British-Ghanaian in present-day Germany. Here, Otoo gives her character more room to breathe, and the author draws poignant connections to Ada's past lives. Patient readers will find Otoo has much to say about ownership and belonging.
