Weight of Ink

WINNER OF A NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD A USA TODAY BESTSELLER A gifted writer, astonishingly adept at nuance, narration, and the politics of passion.Toni Morrison Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, anemigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. When Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of newly discovered seventeenth-century Jewish documents, she enlists the help of Aaron Levy,an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents scribe, the elusive Aleph. Electrifying and ambitious,The Weight of Ink is about women separated by centuriesand the choices and sacrifices they must makein order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind.

RACHEL KADISH is the award-winning author of the novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, and the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, and Tin House.