From The Bookshelves: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Novelist Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana in 1989. As just a toddler, she moved with her family to the United States. Her dad ultimately became an academic, teaching French at the U. of Alabama. Her mother was a nurse.

Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, was a 2016 hit winning numerous literary accolades. It follows the lives of two half-sisters in the 18th century Ghana — one who marries an Englishman and lives in comfort, the other who is sold into slavery in America.

Transcendent Kingdom (2020) is her follow up work. This one isn’t historical fiction. As the publisher sums it up, it’s “a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.”

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.

Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut.

The book landed Gyasi onto the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s 2020 list of Great Immigrants.

-KitJ