A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival ofa major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows ESi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul ofa nation.
Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer. --back cover
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Generational historical fiction and contemporary character-driven narrative come together in acclaimed novels exploring lineage, diaspora, and identity. Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi gained widespread literary recognition with her 2016 debut novel, Homegoing, which traces the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade across eight generations.
Her follow-up novel, Transcendent Kingdom, turns toward the contemporary Ghanaian-American immigrant experience, balancing questions of faith, science, and family grief. Gyasi's work connects deeply personal interior lives with broad historical and social structures.
Born in Ghana in 1989, Gyasi moved to the United States as a child and was raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She completed her undergraduate education at Stanford University, earning a BA in English, before attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop to complete her MFA. While pursuing her graduate degree, she received a Dean's Graduate Research Fellowship to support her fiction.
Gyasi published Homegoing in her mid-twenties to immediate critical acclaim. The debut earned numerous honors, including the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honors in 2016, and an American Book Award in 2017. In 2020, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. She resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Gyasi's writing explores themes of lineage, generational trauma, Black and African identities, and the distinct social and emotional realities of Ghanaian immigrant families in the United States. In Homegoing, she employs a multi-generational structure that alternates between parallel family branches, illustrating how historical forces reverberate across centuries.
In Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi shifts to an intimate, first-person perspective to examine the quiet tensions between neuroscientific inquiry, evangelical faith, addiction, and familial devotion. Across her novels, she pairs emotional precision with broad structural awareness, exploring memory, inheritance, and resilience.
