Yaa Gyasi

Ghana United States

About

Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist born in 1989 in Mampong, Ghana. She moved to the United States as a child and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. Her experiences of navigating different cultural worlds inform her exploration of identity, history, and belonging. Gyasi studied English at Stanford University before earning a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut novel, Homegoing (2016), received widespread critical acclaim, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award. Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom (2020), explores faith, family, grief, and the intersection of science and spirituality through the story of a Ghanaian-American neuroscientist. Gyasi is recognized for her emotionally nuanced storytelling and her ability to connect intimate family experiences with larger historical forces.

Books on TheBookRoads

All genres Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Family Saga

All themes Colonialism Mental Health

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Transcendent Kingdom

Transcendent Kingdom

Gifty, a Ghanaian American neuroscience PhD student at Stanford, searches for answers in the science of addiction while struggling to understand the tragedies that have shaped her family. Her brother Nana, once a promising athlete, died after developing an addiction to opioids, and her deeply religious mother has fallen into a debilitating depression. Torn between the evangelical faith of her childhood and the scientific world she inhabits, Gifty investigates the mechanisms of reward and suffering, hoping to uncover why people hurt themselves and those they love. Intimate and quietly devastating, Transcendent Kingdom explores grief, addiction, faith, and the limits of what science can explain about the human heart.

Homegoing

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born in eighteenth-century Ghana, their lives divided by the forces of slavery and colonialism. Effia marries a British slave trader and lives in comfort above the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle, unaware that her sister Esi is imprisoned below before being sold into slavery in America. From the villages of Ghana to the plantations of the American South and the streets of modern Harlem, their descendants inherit the consequences of choices, violence, and histories they never experienced themselves. Spanning eight generations and three centuries, Homegoing is a powerful exploration of how slavery reshapes families, how trauma travels across generations, and how the past continues to influence the present.

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