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.