Translated from German by Jon Cho-Polizzi

What have a villager in pre-colonial Africa, a Victorian woman conducting an affair with Charles Dickens, and a prisoner forced into prostitution at a German concentration camp in common? In the first instance they are all Ada in name and Ada in spirit, the same spirit, that orbits the universe between existences on earth. Their stories are told by animated objects that bear witness to their lives, repectively a broom, a door knock, and the room where Ada performs her services.

Sharon Dodua Otoo’s debut novel is an inventive one, full of interesting ideas and bold choices. Such as the animated narrators. Technically this limits the field of vision because they cannot move (except the broom which can be moved around). Thus the repeated entreaties to “Bear with me” were well placed because my bearings did need a little stabilising until I got the gist of things and settled into the three narratives. At which point, Dodua Otoo, kills off not one, not two, but all three Adas! Of course, without their deaths there could be no progression into contemporary times.

In the second half, Ada is rebirthed as a Ghanaian immigrant flat-hunting in Berlin. A difficult undertaking for anyone, but for a single pregnant lady of colour with no discernible means of income an impossibility. Fortunately she has her sister to fall back on, though as the child’s birth nears her sister becomes increasingly keen to get Ada off her hands. As for the potential landlords/flatsharers, well, there’s none I’d like to share with, not even the welcoming fellow Africans. (I, too, felt claustrophobic during that viewing.)

Ada’s contemporary life ties in with previous ones through shared experience. Dodua Otto’s intention to show the patterns of abuse that women have suffered and continue to suffer is well realised. Physical and sexual violence, intellectual condescension together with an unhealthy dose of racism are all woven into and mirrored throughout the uncomfortable stories of the individual Adas. Incidents are vividly portrayed but not loaded with gratuitous detail.

I feel that Ada’s Realm has a touch of marmite about it. Some will love every word. Some may “bear with it” less than others. Others like myself will enjoy the premise and the creative storytelling, but reach a tipping point with its political agenda. I was irritated that the major villains were all white men. My eyes rolled when contemporary Ada’s narrator turned out to be a pre-Brexit British passport. But it was the late and almost throwaway insertion of a transgender nurse in order to tick another box that sounded the agenda overload alarm.

Nevertheless, as I said before, an interesting read. My first experience of Afrofuturism which raised as many questions as answers. The most pressing oddly unrelated to the narrative. I am intrigued as to why a British-Ghanaian author, writing in German, chose not to translate her own novel.