One of the most demanding books I’ve read in a while - the first half of this book my brain felt a bit like a wrung out sponge!

Ada’s Realm follows a few different women, but they’re all the same woman. One a new mother in Ghana just as Portuguese traders arrive, one the famed Ada Lovelace, one a woman forced into prostitution during the second world war, and one a pregnant Ghanaian woman newly arrived in Germany. The narration flits around all these variations of Ada, and then occasionally jumps to inanimate objects too, and I really did find the first half of it difficult to follow. It took me a good 4 days to get through the first 150 pages. 

But then when the POV shifts more fully to the incarnation of Ada when she’s young and pregnant in Germany it became a lot clearer and more confident. A lot of it is actually narrated from the POV of her passport, and honestly I’m still not sure if I grasped the meaning of this fully. But I loved the commentary on colonisation, theft, immigration & difference in Germany (not a country I read about often, and when I do it’s from a white person’s perspective), as well as the more personal story of Ada struggling to find her way as a soon-to-be new mother in a country that mostly treats her with cold hostility. 

One to sit with after you’re done!