The Weight of Ink

The novel is set in 1660s London and in the early twenty-first century; it intertwines the stories of two women: Esther Velasquez, a refugee from Amsterdam who becomes a scribe to a blind rabbi shortly before the onslaught of the London plague, and Professor Helen Watt, who, despite her age and frail health, still burns with a passion for history. When Helen is invited by a former student to inspect a hidden cache of accidentally discovered seventeenth-century documents, she brings along as an assistant Aaron Levy—an impatient but charming graduate student from America—and begins the final project of her academic career: to determine the identity of the mysterious scribe who signs only with the single letter “Aleph.” Even though the heroines are separated by centuries, both must make a difficult choice and make sacrifices in order to reconcile the life of the heart and the mind.