![]() ![]() Transcendent Kingdom focuses on one family, deeply exploring grief and trauma, race and class, science and religion. The novel deftly weaves between Gifty’s present life as an anti-social grad student and her religious childhood in Huntsville, Alabama, where Gyasi also grew up. ![]() It’s a PhD thesis she insists is unrelated to her brother Nana’s fatal opioid addiction, or her mother’s debilitating depression. Gifty is a young neuroscientist at Stanford who is studying reward-seeking behaviour in mice. That voice would eventually find a home in Gifty, the narrator of Gyasi’s sophomore novel Transcendent Kingdom (Bond Street Books). She mostly forgot about the short story, but its narrator’s voice stayed with her. Gyasi put that story aside, finished Homegoing and became a bestselling author at 26 years old. Around the same time Yaa Gyasi finished the first draft of Homegoing, her sweeping debut novel examining the impacts of slavery on one Ghanaian family across seven generations, she also wrote a short story about a scholarly young woman whose religious mother comes to live with her. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |