Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway award winner,… award winner, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.
A New York Times Notable Book
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A wonderful, moving debut novel by a very talented writer. I’m looking forward to the next book by Yaa Gyasi.
I couldn’t bear to stop reading this wonderful book. It grabbed me at the first page and I had a hard time putting it aside to go to bed. My only complaint is it ended sooner than I wanted! Yaa Gyasi is a wonderful writer. I hope she writes another blockbuster book soon!
A wonderfully written thoughtful book about 2 sisters and their families. It is a book about generations of people trapped in the world of slavery and the utter disregard for human value by slavers, black and white. It is also a book about loving people and how they keep families together and moving forward thru some of the worst times imaginable. Yaa Gyasi’s words are beautiful music for the eyes. I loved this book.
“Theirs was the kind of life that did not guarantee living.” Moving forward in time from generation to generation among the same families—Ken Follett style—HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi narrates the early slave trade powered by the British and powerful South African tribes to the reality of the black experience in America today.
This line describes the evolution of American slavery with a punch:
“They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.”
In the beginning of the story, both sides—the South African tribes that captured slaves from the north and the British who bought and transported them to America and elsewhere—engaged in their evil undertaking as if the humans traded were any other commodity. The interaction between the two cultures was more of curiosity than disdain:
“The need to call this thing “good” and this thing “bad,” this thing “white” and this thing “black,” was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.”
The power shift is felt first and most horrifically by those enslaved, but ultimately the Africans complicit find the British have taken more than their enemies. For those trafficked to America, abuse and inhumanity remain, even as the civil war concludes and laws and popular rhetoric suggest past wrongs have been righted.
In a dialogue between a disappointed mother to her son, Gyasi writes:
“You keep doin’ what you doin’ and the white man don’t got to do it no more. He ain’t got to sell you or put you in a coal mine to own you. He’ll own you just as is, and he’ll say you the one who did it. He’ll say it’s your fault.”
The novel is work, requiring readers’ full attention to follow the connections and lineage between characters while also absorbing details and present-day consequences of historical happenings that are unimaginable.
In reward for this effort, Yaa Gasi got in my head, pushing me to further examine my lens and perspective.
“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”
Indeed we must. HOMEGOING captured me and I highly recommend it.
A truly captivating and compassionate first novel. Essential to read!
Best book I’ve read this year–showed me sides of slavery I’d never before read of. Incredible