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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK! * Finalist for the WOMEN'S PRIZE
Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is 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.
Author Notes
Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. She is a graduate of Stanford University with a BA in English and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her debut novel, The Homegoing, became a New York Times best seller. In 2016, she was selected as one of the U.S. National Book Foundation's 'five under 35' new writers to watch.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Gyasi's meticulous, psychologically complex second novel (after Homegoing) examines the consequences of a Ghanian family's immigration to Huntsville, Ala. Gifty, the only member of the family born in the United States, is six years into a doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford, where she is attempting to see if she can alter the neural pathways leading to addiction and depression. Her project is motivated by the fate of her beloved older brother who died from a heroin overdose when she was in high school, and by the condition of her depressed mother, who is staying at Gifty's apartment. Though she now determinedly puts her faith in science, Gifty still feels the pull of her evangelical upbringing, and she struggles to reconcile the two opposing belief systems while juggling her dissertation and care for her mother, plus a growing attraction to her awkward lab mate. The narrative moves smoothly between the present and Gifty's childhood, with episodes such as a summer spent in Ghana with her aunt during a previous phase of her mother's depression rising in the background while Gifty works her way up in her field. Gyasi's constraint renders the emotional impact of the novel all the more powerful: her descriptions of the casual racism endured by the family, particularly at the hands of their nearly all-white church in Alabama, is more chilling for being so matter-of-fact. At once a vivid evocation of the immigrant experience and a sharp delineation of an individual's inner struggle, the novel brilliantly succeeds on both counts. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Following her spectacularly lauded, bestselling historical and ancestral debut, Homegoing (2016), Gyasi's turns to the contemporary, tracing the dissolution of a Ghanaian immigrant family. By the time Gifty leaves Alabama for Harvard, she's resolved to "build a new Gifty from scratch" by shedding the debilitating experiences of her young life: her father's abandonment and return to Ghana, her older brother Nana's heroin overdose, her mother's suicidal depression, her faltering faith. In Cambridge, she could be "confident, poised, smart . . . strong and unafraid." Four years later, she's untethered again, arriving at Stanford to work toward a neuroscience PhD. For all her groundbreaking research, she's really just trying to comprehend what happened to beloved Nana via cocaine-and-then-Ensure-addicted lab mice which became willing to risk physical damage for gratification. Six years into the program, Gifty's mother arrives, once more cripplingly withdrawn. Her silent presence will require some semblance of confrontation and reconciliation with their tragic past. Despite compounding challenges and tragedies, Gyasi never allows Gifty to devolve into paralyzing self-absorption and malaise. With deft agility and undeniable artistry, Gyasi's latest is an eloquent examination of resilient survival.
Guardian Review
In her award-winning 2016 debut, Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi used a multi-generational family saga to trace slavery's complex legacy in America and west Africa. Family is central in her second novel, too, which tells a piercing story of faith, science and the opioid crisis. Rather than multiplying and fanning out across the world, however, this particular family is shrinking, its domain narrowing. "There used to be four of us, then three, two. When my mother goes, whether by choice or not, there will be only one," observes Gifty, the narrator of Transcendent Kingdom. Seventeen years earlier, sunk by grief and depression, Gifty's Ghanaian mother tried to kill herself. Now she's again taken to her bed - or rather, her daughter's bed, since her concerned evangelical pastor has managed to get her on a plane from her Huntsville, Alabama, home to Stanford, where Gifty is studying for a PhD in neuroscience. Their prickly mother-daughter dynamic is haunted by absence: first, of the patriarch who abandoned them to return to Ghana when Gifty was small, and then of Nana, her older brother, a high-school basketball star who died of a heroin overdose as a teenager. If it seems pleasingly apt that Gifty's research project uses optogenetics to rewire the brains of addiction-prone mice, she's quick to insist that it was merely her quest for the hardest possible subject that has led her here. That's the kind of heroine she is - determined, guarded and, more than she likes to admit, her mother's daughter. We see little of the older woman besides her turned back, huddled beneath the bedcovers, yet she dominates the novel - tough, sad and quick to dismiss even an "I love you" as "white people foolishness". As a girl, Gifty nicknamed her the Black Mamba, but is she callous? "It is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound," Gifty notes, ever the scientist. Flashbacks allow Gyasi to tell the story of how four became two, dipping into material that seems flavoursomely autobiographical: Gyasi, too, is Ghanaian-American and grew up in Huntsville before heading off to aprestigious college. In particular, the heat and faith of the deep south shimmer on the page, localising the immigrant experience. There's prejudice, too, though racism is a word that Gifty's mother rarely uses, and Gifty herself has no desire to be thought of as a black woman scientist; she wants to be seen as a scientist, full stop. Still - and here as elsewhere, her drollery is complicated - she admits there can be advantages to being in a minority: "It's remarkable how cool you can seem when you are the only black person in a room, even when you've done nothing cool at all." In her girlhood journal, Gifty vowed to remake herself following her brother's death. She has, in a way, but she's forever trying to cover up holes in her education and upbringing. The new Gifty has lost her faith, too, though her mother's devotion continues to move her, and she finds herself drawing on a religious vocabulary even in the lab. Science, she secretly concedes, can only get her so far in grasping the force that snatched her brother from her, and it's in its heroine's frank efforts to defuse the dichotomy between religion and science that Transcendent Kingdom really sings. There's bravery as well as beauty here. By training and temperament, Gifty is uncomfortable with "speculating, assuming, feeling". It makes her an intriguing narrator and, since this is the very stuff of fiction, sets up a provocative tension between the novel's subject and form. But it also inhibits the emergence of Nana as a fully formed character. While Gyasi conjures up some memorable images, such as the OxyContin pills, hidden in the ceiling near a lamp, "like dead bugs, once drawn to the light", the contours of his druggy hell - the relapses, the rages - are overly familiar. There's also the novel's back-and-forth structure, which can become repetitive, sapping its momentum, and a brisk addendum feels at once too much and too little. All the same, these are relatively small quibbles when stacked against the successes of a narrative that contrives to be intimate and philosophical. In science, Gifty notes, the hard part is trying to work out what the question is, asking something sufficiently interesting and different. Transcendent Kingdom is full of exactly those kinds of questions.
Kirkus Review
A scientist weighs the big questions that her private trauma bequeaths her. After Homegoing (2016) swept through seven generations, Gyasi's wise second novel pivots toward intimacy. It unspools entirely in the voice of watchful, reticent, brilliant Gifty, 28, nearly finished with her doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford's School of Medicine. Her formidable mother, a home health care aide, has plummeted into a second severe depression, and their family pastor has dispatched the limp woman toward Gifty via airplane from Huntsville, Alabama, "folding her up the way you would a jumpsuit." The first episode, when Gifty was 11, arrived after an opiate overdose stole the life of 16-year-old Nana, the firstborn son and more cherished child. Both times the Ghanaian matriarch has crawled mutely into bed, but this time not before asking adult Gifty if she still prays. "No," says Gifty, who turns her ontological questions on lab mice. She gets them addicted to Ensure and then opens their brains surgically, probing the neural pathways of recklessness, looking for clues to creating restraint. Gifty hopes to apply her results to "the species Homo Sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say." This work, Gifty insists, has zero to do with her brother's death. In 54 microchapters and precise prose, Gyasi creates an ache of recognition, especially for readers knowledgeable about the wreckage of addiction. Still, she leavens this nonlinear novel with sly humor, much more than in Homegoing, as the daughter of a traditional woman weighs what it means to walk in the world not quite a nonbeliever. The author is astute about childhood grandiosity and a pious girl's deep desire to be good; she conveys in brief strokes the notched, nodding hook of heroin's oblivion. In its wake, adult Gifty sits with the limits of both bench science and evangelical Christianity. Nowhere does Gyasi take a cheap shot. Instead, she writes a final chapter that gives readers a taste of hard-won deliverance. In a quietly poignant story, a lonely woman finds a way to be less alone. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Gyasi's (Homegoing) beautifully crafted story is a masterwork of intertwining time lines and narratives. Gifty, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, sees her family go from four to three to two when her father travels back to Ghana for a visit but never returns to the family home in Alabama and her brother, a star basketball player, injures his ankle, becomes hooked on pain pills, and dies of a heroin overdose. His death sends Gifty's mother into a deep depression. As an adult, Gifty is studying neuroscience at Stanford when her mother suffers from another bout of depression and is sent to stay with her in California. Gifty begins to examine the spiritual beliefs she grew up with in her evangelical church, the emotions surrounding her brother's addiction and her mother's depression, and how each of those has affected her relationships as an adult. Bahni Turpin weaves Ghanaian words and accents and scientific terminology effortlessly into the narration of the story. Though the story is told from Gifty's perspective, Turpin creates unique voices for the host of supporting characters and makes it feel like there is a cast of voice actors instead of just one. VERDICT A must read. This is one of the rare books that is so well crafted, the narrative(s) flow so effortlessly, that you only feel the power of the story and don't realize the complex structure underneath.--Courtney Pentland, Omaha, NE
