Ada's Room

A Novel

By: Sharon Dodua Otoo, Jon Cho-Polizzi - translator

Narrated by: Cyril Nri, Debbie Korley

Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2023 Sharon Dodua Otoo (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"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