![]() program in neuroscience at Stanford, and her mother - for the second time - has tumbled into a deep and abiding depression. When the story opens, the narrator, Gifty, is nearing the end of her Ph.D. connection - and so much more - through the lens of a single family. In her sophomore outing, Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi has countered that complaint with an intimate first-person narrative that pulls us back into the Ghana-U.S. Though that struck me as Gyasi’s point - how so much of these people’s humanity was lost to posterity through the barbarism of slavery and its aftermath - it remained that readers longed to spend more time with her pointedly rendered characters. ![]() If there was a complaint to be made, it was that we never got to spend enough time with each beautifully drawn character as the book moved chapter by chapter through generations on either side of the Atlantic. At the time, I wrote that it was “ stunning in its scope and complexity.” The candidates that year were uniformly exceptional, but Gyasi’s was a book apart. ![]() ![]() I first read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, when I served as a judge for the 2016 National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Prize. ![]()
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