Hardcover, 264 pages
English language
Published July 6, 2021 by Knopf.
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 fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford 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 a knee 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 …
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 fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford 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 a knee 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.
Can science and God be reconciled? Why are some people prone to addiction? How not to deal with trauma. Struggled to hold my attention or interest.
there was something so familiar in the writing style and the way transitions were both abrupt and heavy with internal meaning, that I loved this book and didn't want it to end. It reminded me of books I used to read, when I loved to read, and the act was untainted by needing a 'cause' or a politically correct framing (except for chapter 36 which was so heavy-handed that I feel certain an editor asked for a direct link where none was warranted) For some reason Mary Gaitskills' Bad Behavior comes to mind but maybe that's because it was a book that surprised and delighted me in that surprise.
As a scientist who, as a child, took God so seriously that it was major aspect of even my playtime, I found the main character infinitely relatable. in the book her religion is something that makes her feel transcendent then foolish …
there was something so familiar in the writing style and the way transitions were both abrupt and heavy with internal meaning, that I loved this book and didn't want it to end. It reminded me of books I used to read, when I loved to read, and the act was untainted by needing a 'cause' or a politically correct framing (except for chapter 36 which was so heavy-handed that I feel certain an editor asked for a direct link where none was warranted) For some reason Mary Gaitskills' Bad Behavior comes to mind but maybe that's because it was a book that surprised and delighted me in that surprise.
As a scientist who, as a child, took God so seriously that it was major aspect of even my playtime, I found the main character infinitely relatable. in the book her religion is something that makes her feel transcendent then foolish then ashamed. it's something concrete she can refer to to explain her distance from others. she watches her life from the outside, certain that she's the only one this happens to.
granted, she is exceptionally bright and forced into realms much earlier than most: into her church youth group at 7, adult church at almost 9, caregiver of her mother at 11. she had to endure losing her brother, the only person who she felt truly knew her, first to his mood swings over his own inability to confront his feelings about their father abandoning him, then to drugs, and finally to death. her strain with her mother is exacerbated by real neglect (sure, depression is not a choice, but that doesn't change the effect a suicide attempt brings) but it's a tension all of us have, in some way. again, I am awed by this author's deftness inside the topic:
Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn't me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it's a lesson that doesn't stick, that can't, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother... When she wants for me things that I don't want for myself... I am angry that she doesn't understand me, doesn't see me as my own separate person, but that anger stems from the fact that I don't see her that way either. I want her to know what I want the same way I know it, intimately, immediately.
