The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

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

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, an emigrant 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 centuries-and the choices and sacrifices they must make in order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind.