Ada's Room: A Novel

Ada's Room: A Novel

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. Praise for Ada's Room "Thrillingly, astonishingly original. You will not have read anything quite like this before." —R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries "[A] novel that demands a great deal emotionally and intellectually of the reader, but its boldness and ambition leave an indelible imprint. A rule-shattering novel about the presentness of the past." — Kirkus “An impressive and highly original work, brimming over with energy.” – Times Literary Supplement   “Sharon Dodua Otoo is the new voice in German literature.... Her debut novel goes big.” — Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger   "Otoo is a singular voice in contemporary German literature.... [A] daring experiment, not unlike Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing ." — Der Tagesspiegel   "By effortlessly moving between centuries in her novel, Sharon Dodua Otoo reveals not only the weight of history that comes to bear on a young Black woman in dire circumstances who is looking for a home – it also demonstrates which patterns have remained powerful to this day." — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Sharon Dodua Otoo is the winner of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and will be 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. This is her first novel. Jon Cho-Polizzi is an Assistant Professor of German at the University of Michigan, and a literary translator. He lives and works between Ann Arbor, Northern California, and Berlin. Ada Totope March 1459 During the longest night of the year, blood clung to my forehead and my baby died. Finally. He had whimpered in his final moments, and Naa Lamiley had caressed his cheek. How lovely, I had thought, that this would be his final memory. She lay beside him, the child between us, and her head rested next to mine. Naa Lamiley's eyes shimmered as she assured me it would not be much longer now, "God willing." She whispered because all of our mothers were sleeping on the other side of the room, but Naa Lamiley's voice would have given out at any moment anyway. Together, we had cried and prayed at my baby's side for the last three nights. I could barely hear her, and I understood her even less. While she caressed him, she had stared at me, as if surprised by my confusion-though the words How would you know? never left my lips. In an already unbearable situation, this moment was particularly absurd. Naa Lamiley always knew. But in that moment-it was quite literally a matter of my own flesh and blood-I did not want to seem clueless to her. To distract myself, I scratched my forehead. I scratched and forgot I had blood under my nails. The few candles Naa Lamiley had gathered and placed before the doorway flickered. "It was this way with Kofi, too." She breathed softly, as if she did not wish to disturb my son while he was dying. Shame on me. This was not so long ago. The ensuing silence resulting from my shame and her sympathy accompanied us through the final tortured breaths. The candles wept. Outside, Naa Lamiley had prepared a tiny pad of palm leaves to lay him out in the moonlit courtyard. She spread a white cloth over it. There would be no grave. The boy did not even have a name; he was only five days old. And yet he had tarried longer than my first child. Also a boy. He had opened his eyes immediately after birth, looked around, and evidently not liked what he had seen. That little one had left us before I could even take him in my arms. Naa Lamiley squeezed my hand o