October 1, 2022
Following Hargrave's adult debut, the Betty Trask honoree The Mercies, The Dance Tree spins off from real-life events as it visits 1518 Strasbourg, France, where women have begun dancing wildly in the town square and provoked a state of emergency (40,000-copy first printing). Opening in a fishing village in British colonial--ruled Singapore, Suicide Club author Heng's The Great Reclamation features a sweet boy with an extraordinary gift--he sees shifting islands no one else can--who comes of age during the Japanese occupation and, with a neighborhood girl, ends up remapping the future (75,000-copy first printing). Following the multi-best-booked Yellow Wind, Johnson's The House of Eve intertwines the stories of two young Black women--15-year-old Ruby, whose college ambitions are threatened by an ill-advised affair, and Howard University student Eleanor, looking for acceptance from her boyfriend's elite Black family. In Loesch's debut, The Last Russian Doll, a Russian �migr� studying at Oxford returns to Moscow after her mother's death and uncovers a family tragedy stretching back to the 1917 Revolution. A prize winner in Germany and a publishing phenomenon there and in the UK, where Berlin-based British-Ghanian Otoo is a Cambridge writer in residence, Ada's Room features four Adas: a 15th-century West African woman who confronts a Portuguese slave trader, Victorian England's Ada Lovelace, a Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp inmate, and a contemporary resident of Berlin, connected to them all in spirit. Following The Yellow Bird Sings, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Rosner's Once We Were Home builds on real-life events to tell the stories of Jewish children wrenched from their families during World War II--like Ana, who remembers the mother who smuggled her out of a Polish ghetto, and Ana's brother, who knows only the family who raised him. In Spence-Ash's Beyond That, the Sea, Bea Thompson is sent from bomb-blasted World War II London to live in safety with a family in Boston, MA, and becomes so contented with her new life that she is reluctant to return home (150,000-copy first printing). From the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Walls, Hang the Moon follows the life of feisty young Sallie Kincaid, daughter of the big man about town in Prohibition-era Virginia, who's back home to reclaim her place nine years after being ejected from the family. The USA Today best-selling Webb's Strangers in the Night replays the romance between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Two Wars and a Wedding, the New York Times best-selling Willig follows aspiring archaeologist Betsy Hayes from 1896 Greece, where she ends up tending the wounded as fighting breaks out with Turkey, and 1898 Cuba, where she serves with the Red Cross during the Spanish American War, hoping to find a lost friend (75,000-copy first printing).
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January 30, 2023
Otoo (Synchronicity) tracks a woman through many reincarnations and across centuries and continents in her clever if meandering latest. Readers first encounter Ada in 1400s Ghana, where she grieves the loss of her infant. Next, Ada’s a mathematician in 19th-century London, where’s she’s addicted to gambling and carries on an affair with Charles Dickens. During WWII, Ada is sent by the Nazis to a concentration camp and forced to work in a brothel. In each of her lives, Ada receives the same mystical beaded bracelet, which figures each time into her death at the hands of a man (in Victorian England, it’s her wedding bracelet). Before each iteration, an unnamed angellike narrator tries to prevent Ada from meeting a similar fate as the last, reminding her, “all beings—past, present, and future—are connected,” but Ada always forgets. Taken together, the early accounts of Ada feel a bit scattershot, but Otoo hits her stride after introducing the final version of Ada, pregnant and British-Ghanaian in present-day Germany. Here, Otoo gives her character more room to breathe, and the author draws poignant connections to Ada’s past lives. Patient readers will find Otoo has much to say about ownership and belonging. Agent: Markus Hoffman, Regal Hoffman Assoc.
February 15, 2023
A woman is reborn again and again, from 15th-century West Africa to modern Europe. Ada is a mother grieving the loss of her infant son in the year 1459 in West Africa, attended to by older women who have become family since she was ripped away from her birth family by Portuguese colonizers as a girl. Ada also lives in 1848 in London, the daughter of a famous poet and destined to become a brilliant mathematician, creating an "Analytical Engine" and thus cementing her legacy as a pioneer in computing. (Sound familiar?) But not only that: Ada is also captive in a concentration-camp brothel in 1945, entertaining "stripes" 15 minutes at a time. She is also a pregnant woman in Brexit-era Europe, having grown up in Ghana and now about to start university in Berlin. To say this is a novel in which a single soul inhabits different bodies through time (the narrator calls these lives "orbits") is to mightily reduce the book's complexity and inventiveness. For example, the shape-shifting narrator sometimes takes the form of objects, including a broom, a door knocker, a room, and a British passport. Even within this already nontraditional structure, Ada's narrative is told in a fragmented, nonlinear fashion. Several times throughout the novel, characters glimpse their reflections in surfaces overlaid with what is outside: a corpse, bare branches. This is an apt metaphor for the novel itself as layers of history accumulate, a palimpsest of upheavals that are always both personal and part of larger political forces that show the power-seeking ("the luckiest") attempting to crush the powerless. This is 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.
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March 15, 2023
Otoo's literary first novel features a fragmented narrative spanning from the fifteenth century to the near-present and loosely linking the different segments with a fertility bracelet and a woman who repeatedly reincarnates as Ada. In 1459 on Africa's Gold Coast, Ada has just lost her baby when the Portuguese come ashore. In 1838, Ada's two passions are mathematics and her affair with Charles Dickens. In 1945, Ada suffers the horrors of forced prostitution in the Dora concentration camp. In 2019, a pregnant Ada has emigrated from Ghana to Germany. Otoo draws on some characters from history, including the nineteenth-century mathematician Ada Lovelace, who has a more dramatic end here than in her real life. A blithe God makes frequent appearances in a variety of guises, and the narrator, curiously, is a different object in each story line: a broom, door knocker, passport, even Ada's room in the "special barracks" of the concentration camp. There are asides to the reader, and the prose occasionally reads like free verse poetry. A creative and impressionistic meditation on themes of feminism, racism, belonging, and motherhood.
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