The new novel · Stories of Money, Family, and Adinkra
The Farewell Ledger
Stories of Money, Family, and Adinkra
When her aunt Adwoa dies in Kumasi, Ghana, Abena Kwarteng, a hospital billing clerk in Worcester, Massachusetts, inherits no money. Instead she receives an adinkra cloth stamped with eighteen symbols, a box of handwritten ledgers, and one rule: read one story a month, and don’t skip ahead.
Eighteen symbols. Eighteen stories.
Each adinkra symbol on the cloth opens a story, and each story carries the wisdom of its symbol into a real money decision:
- A chef reckons with a failed restaurant.
- A nurse is trapped by loan apps.
- A carpenter starts investing at fifty-one.
- An engineer co-signs a cousin’s loan.
- A fish-seller who can’t read takes on a loan shark.
Every chapter closes with “On the Ledger,” plain-language lessons on emergency savings, debt, budgeting, insurance, fraud, wills and financial independence. Rooted in Akan proverbs and Ghanaian family life, it is literary fiction for book clubs, for readers of African fiction, and for every family that has never talked about money.
Some inheritances aren’t money.
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For book clubs · Free PDF
The Farewell Ledger Book Club Kit
Fifteen discussion questions on money, family, inheritance and Sankofa, story conversations, a one-story-a-month reading plan, and dinner-table money questions to take home. Printable, 7 pages.
Also by Elijah Asare: Cedis & Dreams (teens & young adults) · Coin Quest Island (ages 5–8) · About the author