Transcendent Kingdom: A novel (A Read with Jenna Pick)

Yaa Gyasi

Sep 2020 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

"What problems do we solve by identifying problems circling them?" Anyone who has had addiction touch their lives has had that question in some form be a part of the answer they live. Gifty, her brother Nana, her mother and father all deal, or not deal, with life in "the West". After her brother's overdose, her mother retreats and Gifty hides, searching for answers: G-d? Science? Relationships, or lack thereof? I kept hoping that all the hype that had put it on my "wish list" would be true, and it was. I love the Gifty character. She really is a gift. And coming from an addicted family, it was easy to follow the story even with the skewed timeline. The old story about Pandora's Box has been wandering through my brain as I have read this; because, at the bottom of this story truly hope still survives. Highly Recommended 5/5 [disclaimer: I received this book from an outside source and voluntarily chose to read and review it]

it doesn't make a difference if you can identify problems without solutions, keep talking if you have solutions.

It was a Good book but I love her First Book Better...

About the author

YAA GYASI was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her debut novel, Homegoing, won her the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” honors for 2016, and the American Book Award. She lives in Brooklyn.