“Seven generations of two half-sister bloodlines, one in Ghana and one in America, beginning with their separate births in eighteenth-century Fanteland and ending in present-day Stanford.”
What's in this book
- Yaa Gyasi's 2016 debut novel - seven generations of two half-sister bloodlines from Ghana to America
- National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; one of the canonical contemporary American diaspora novels
- 320 pages structured as fourteen near-standalone chapters, one per generation
- Begins with two eighteenth-century Fante half-sisters who never meet but live above and below Cape Coast Castle
- Dominic Hoffman audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Pachinko, Beloved, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and contemporary multi-generational diaspora fiction
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Homegoing is Yaa Gyasi's 2016 debut novel, the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and one of the canonical contemporary American multi-generational diaspora novels. The structural premise is two eighteenth-century Fante half-sisters, Effia and Esi, born to the same mother but to different fathers and unaware of each other. Effia is married off to a British colonial governor and lives in the upper rooms of Cape Coast Castle, the literal location whose dungeons hold Esi, who has been captured in a tribal raid and is being prepared for the Middle Passage. The novel runs seven generations down each of the two bloodlines (Effia's descendants remain in Ghana through the present day; Esi's descendants travel from American chattel slavery through Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the crack era, and Stanford in the present) across fourteen chapters of approximately twenty pages each.
Gyasi's structural method is the patient one-chapter-per-generation construction; each chapter is structurally complete in itself (each could be read as a standalone short story) and each is connected to the others through specific objects, family lore, and historical-architectural continuity that travel down the two bloodlines across two hundred fifty years. The Ghana chapters carry the structural emotional weight; the British coastal occupation, the inland Asante kingdom, the early-twentieth-century missionary schools, and the late-twentieth-century Ghanaian academy are rendered with the kind of patient historical specificity that contemporary American literary fiction about West Africa rarely commits to. The American chapters do the structural work of layering generation onto generation across the two-hundred-year arc the project requires.
Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Gyasi entry point alongside Transcendent Kingdom (2020), and as one of the canonical contemporary multi-generational diaspora novels. Read alongside Pachinko (Min Jin Lee) on the related multi-generational project across a different geography. The Dominic Hoffman audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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Transcendent Kingdom
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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi 2020 review. A Stanford neuroscience graduate student runs reward-circuit experiments on mice while her Ghanaian-born mother lives in her apartment. Gyasi's second novel after Homegoing.
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Beloved
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Song of Solomon
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