Ada's Realm

Ada's Realm follows four women who share a name and a fight for survival, their lives stretched across centuries and continents. In fifteenth-century Ghana, a mother who has lost her child confronts a Portuguese slaver. In Victorian England, a mathematician whose character is drawn from the life of Lord Byron's only child tries to keep an affair with Charles Dickens hidden from her husband. In 1945, a prisoner in a brothel inside the Buchenwald camp, also named Ada, is determined to live through one more day.

What links them is an unidentified but sentient spirit and a bracelet of fertility beads, each of which reaches a different Ada at a pivotal moment in her life. Their separate narratives eventually converge on a present-day Ada, a young Ghanaian woman who is pregnant, alone, and searching for a home in Berlin before her baby arrives. With the help of the spirit they share, she has a chance to break a cycle of injustice that has run through all their lives.

The novel treats history as something other than a straight line, showing how one woman's experience can matter to another woman's life four hundred years later on a different continent. Its tone moves between deep emotion and sharp, sometimes grim, humor, and it ends on a hopeful note. Its concerns are love, family, justice, and the need for a home. The author, Sharon Dodua Otoo, is a British-Ghanaian writer based in Berlin.