"Wise, haunting and deeply affecting exploration of family loss, love and seeking a sense of belonging."
Ablaze with the raw struggles and hopefulness of humanity, and delivered in dazzling style, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom crosses generations and continents, and entwines the personal struggles of a young woman trying to recover from grief and familial pain in the context of being an immigrant family in the American South.
Gifty works as a scientist in California, studying addiction in mice, wondering whether her optogenetics research might “work on people who need it most”, as in “Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?” Narratives of her present and various pasts are elegantly interwoven - Gifty and her brother Nana’s religious upbringing in racist Alabama amidst their parent’s escalating arguments (their father hadn’t wanted to leave Ghana); Gifty’s academic progress; Nana’s fatal heroin overdose. Now only Gifty and her mother remain in America, and her mother is deeply depressed: “My mother, in her bed, infinitely still, was wild inside,” and still Gifty feels “I would always have something to prove and nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.”
The charting of Nana’s decline from promising basketball player to addict after an on-court accident is heartbreakingly affecting, as is their mother’s descent into depression and Gifty’s persistent sense of shame and pain at what happened to her brother, with her life’s work being an attempt to understand it all. This eloquent, incisive novel seeps into the soul and reveals raw truths about grief and healing deep wounds.
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
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