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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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I don’t know if I have enough words to describe the way I love Yaa Gyasi’s writing. I have given copies of her first book,  Homegoing, to every reader that I know. Her second book, Transcendent Kingdom, is at first glance very different but deals with many similar themes. Transcendent Kingdom is told by Gifty, a neuroscientist researching addictive behavior in mice. She’s brilliant, a dedicated scientist at a world class institution, but also a loner who wants human connection but pushes it away at every […]

Thoughtful meditation on science, faith and family

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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Yaa Gyasi is best known for her critically acclaimed first novel, Homegoing.  Unlike Homegoing, which I gather has a broad sweep in terms in geography and time (its in my TBR pile!), Transcendent Kingdom is narrowly focused on one woman, Gifty, in her adolescent to early adult years.  Although the scope of the novel expands a little to include Gifty’s immediate family and a few friends, the novel remains focused on her experiences with these additional cast members- we see them through her eyes. We […]

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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We all lost our collective minds over Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, which was a century-spanning epic about race and family, so the pressure was on for her sophomore effort. I think she’s made the smart choice to try for something completely different. Where Homegoing had buckets of characters, narrated in the third person, and a new setting and time period every fifty or so pages, Transcendent Kingdom is a smaller, more intimate portrait of one woman thinking about her life, and thinking about her […]

“I’m a gallery of broken hearts”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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  Yaa Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, was a sprawling family saga about a family whose point of origin was Ghana. Though the family in Transcendent Kingdom also hails from there, this book is nothing like its predecessor. Rather than than span though generations, this book’s main focus is on one person as she deals with the pain and loss her family deals with after coming to America in search of a better life. Gifty is a neuroscience candidate at Stanford studying reward seeking behavior in […]

This is Why We Read

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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This is an astounding book. Profound. Heartbreakingly beautiful. Gyasi employs a narrative structure I haven’t seen before, and it is just one of a million choices she makes that is exactly right. The entire book is exactly right. Each plot point, each character, each word. Each chapter is its own stunning creation, and they all fit together with precision and symmetry into an intricate and complex quilt worthy of being hung on the wall and admired or wrapped around your shoulders and treasured. Why does […]



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