Ada's Room

Ada's Room is a novel that moves across generations and continents to show how the lives of four women are linked. Each of them is named Ada, and each is fighting to survive. In 15th century Ghana, an Ada buries her child and faces a Portuguese enslaver. In Victorian England, Ada Lovelace, a mathematical genius and the only child of Lord Byron, tries to keep her affair with Charles Dickens hidden from her husband. In 1945, a third Ada is held in a camp brothel at Buchenwald, where she has to get through one more day.

The women are bound together by an unseen but sentient spirit and by a bracelet of fertility beads that each of them comes across at a turning point in her life. Their stories interweave and lead to a present-day Ada, a young Ghanaian woman who is pregnant and alone in Berlin and is looking for a home before her baby is born. The shared spirit looks for a way to help her break a long cycle of injustice.

The book rejects the idea of history as a straight line, showing how one woman's experience can matter to another's four hundred years later and on a different continent. Its tone is at times darkly funny and ultimately hopeful, and it follows people struggling for love, family, justice and a place to call home.

The novel was originally published in German as Adas Raum. Sharon Dodua Otoo is a British-born writer based in Berlin.