Ada's Room -- Sharon Dodua Otoo, Hardcover

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.

Author: Sharon Dodua Otoo
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 03/28/2023
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.99lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.86w x 1.19d
ISBN: 9780593539798

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2022 pg. 8
Publishers Weekly 01/30/2023
Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2023
Booklist 03/15/2023 pg. 35

About the Author
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.