NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK! • Finalist for the WOMEN’S PRIZEYaa 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 … 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.
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Beautiful and heartbreaking
“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]
What a beautiful book. Transcendent writing.
Yaa Gyasi’s ‘Homegoing’ was about the ill effects of forced migration on a people, and ‘Transcendent Kingdom’ is in some ways about (among many other things) the ill effects of voluntary migration on a family. In both novels, there is still the underlying message that there may be little to recommend about the American experience for Black people, be they immigrants, or American-born.
In this book, the main protagonist is Gifty, a neuroscientist and the daughter of Ghanian immigrants. She, her brother and parents live in Alabama, where they find a tenuous sense of community in their church and among the sports culture that glorifies her brother’s athleticism, even while they hold some degree of scorn for his Blackness. When Gifty’s father, unable to acclimate to the lifestyle of subservience required of him in America, returns to Ghana and stays there, the family begin to fracture, especially Nana, Gifty’s brother who is hurt most by the abandonment of his father with whom he shared a close bond.
We meet Gifty many years after the final, devastating breakdown of her family and she is a solitary figure with few friends, struggling to understand the nature of God, love, addiction and mental illness all through her lab experiments on mice. Academically brilliant but emotionally and socially challenged, Gifty tries throughout the novel to come to terms with the losses she and her family experienced by ruminating on her religious background, the struggle of Black immigrants in a place that devalues Blackness, and whether science can ever help her understand and answer big existential questions.
Anyone looking for things to ‘happen’ in a novel, like seismic shifts of understanding or transformational moments, might just want to skip this book. This one is more about a single character fighting their demons, putting their life’s biggest moments into proper context and finally finding a kind of peace. Yaa Gyasi’s observations about life, society, and race through Gifty were by turns profound, humorous, and heartbreaking. This book is not just the product of an amazing talent, but clearly also that of an amazing mind.
And as an aside, can I just say … I really have to respect an author who takes the challenging step of making their main character a neuroscientist when they are not themselves a neuroscientist … because you really can’t fake that, you have to learn enough to accurately reflect it on the page, so even the painstaking descriptions of Gifty’s experiments which some readers complained about impressed me. It shows me just how true this author is to her craft, that she made a choice that a much lazier writer absolutely would not have considered let alone have made.
Recommended for readers of introspective literary fiction.
I picked up this book because I loved Gyasi’s debut, Homegoing. I kept reading because TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM is a treasure. The protagonist, Gifty, reconciles an evangelical christian upbringing with a career as a scientist. She processes the addiction and loss of a brother, the debilitating depression of a mother, and the loss of a father. What is remarkable is the woven nature of the narrative and the number of threads woven. From present to past and past to present, the novel invests in various story-lines and relationships so elegantly, I found myself wondering “how’d she do that?” At the time, Gyasi broke the age-old adage of “show, don’t tell” with her masterful interplay of philosophizing exposition and scene. Lessons learned and unlearned and relearned stand out as the glue. Loved the book and the audio which was masterfully narrated.
The writing is beautiful! I’ve loved both of her books and highly recommend
Highly recommended.
I loved Homegoing but this book, Transcendent Kingdom, was boring to me.
This book is written through the mind of a twenty-eight year old student intern working on her doctorate… I think.
Gifty is a very intelligent woman. She’s working on her third (or fourth) medical paper on her research with mice and how addiction effects the brain. She is trying to understand not only the physiological aspects, but the psychological, spiritual, and any other aspect that may have an effect. Her drive of her research is to find out what causes addiction, how to prevent it, how to cure it, and ultimately why it effected her brother.
Although eloquently written, I struggled with following along with the story. It constantly jumped around from present, to past, to one location to another… sometimes even in the same sentence! It was an intriguing read and I understood the concept of it trying to portray. I just don’t feel it was executed the way it was intended, or maybe it was and that’s the point.
4.5* This book has so much breadth, so many avenues for thoughtful exploration, so many issues like rabbit holes you can easily get lost in. This is a wonderful thought-provoking existential read and then some. At a superficial glance it is about the juxtaposition of scientific inquiry and religious faith as guides and comforts to a turbulent life, the efficacy and shortcomings of both rooted in Gifty’s personal life experience and the tragedies which play out around her, most poignantly depression and addiction.
This book had other underlying or related themes though. Cloaked themes such as unrelenting fear, and emotional ineptitude. Gifty is loathed to speak her truth, struggling with her own agency in coming to terms with her ‘background’, her own inability to change the horrific incidents in her life which had, at times, nothing and everything to do with her. The inability to speak or come to terms with familial difficulties rooted in a rich cultural immigrant experience in America. The schizophrenia of cultural context, the anomie, the injustices and the average citizen’s perceived inability to do anything about ‘anything’ when things go badly wrong.
When Gifty’s father leaves the family, her abandoned mother’s deepening depression is the result. Gifty’s burden and pain doesn’t stop there however. Her elder brother, after an accident, is prescribed opioids, which spirals quickly into serious addiction. Gifty narrates her deteriorating family life like a brave lonely voice looking from a confused biblical wilderness into a morphing ‘real life’ chaos, a chaos beyond and above her control.
The book shifts back and forth in time, and geography (the plot set both in America and Ghana) and the reader is firmly placed in Gifty’s head, reading thought after thought thrumming through, painful heart-wrenching flashbacks told in quite an objective tone. I couldn’t help thinking of her mice, and the parallels there. As a neuroscientist she does various experimental things to her mice, looking at the cerebral processes of pleasure and reward stimulation. The mice have no free will. Their lives are being manipulated and tortured in the hope of revealing greater scientific truth. In Gifty’s head there is a moral-amoral battle constantly raging, at a distance, one she has unending difficulty reconciling.
The book is full of references to scripture, and science like grand umbrellas with their very different approaches to mental illness and addiction. While I enjoyed so many of these references, sometimes I wanted to learn and see more of ‘her’, Gifty. Not what the preacher or teacher had told her to think or the Tertiary training and research, but then I realized the confusion, insecurity and grayness of her own free will was apt. Her long monologues felt like her first attempts to deal with who ‘she’ was, honestly, without judging the different sides of her, the different manifestations of self, which is a process each of us have to go through and one that doesn’t stop until we pass.
Transcendent Kingdom is a wonderful read on its own, but following ‘Homegoing’ – which is one of my favorite novels of all time – therein lies the difficulty. This book does transcend but the ending felt a bit rushed and left me wanting … more. Maybe that’s a clever ploy on this brilliant author’s part, as I’m still thinking through so much of the spiritual turmoil, but I just wanted more solidity at the end. Yet, true to life, I guess, Gifty’s situation is on-going, as transcendence is not only elusive, it’s destination remains loose.
Not as good as her first novel, but still worth reading.
Transcendent Kingdom is a masterfully written philosophical read about Gifty, a Ghanaian-American woman who is a brilliant PhD student, a neuroscientist at Stanford by way of Harvard. Gifty’s brother died of a heroin overdose, which lead her to study addiction and depression while looking for answers in the hard sciences through her mice test subjects. This brilliant novel explores her immigrant life experiences, and her struggles with her faith and the people around her as she details growing up in Alabama. Told in first person through Gifty’s voice, I often had to remember if this was a true story memoir that I was reading or a literary fiction. The lines blur as I am engrossed in the rawness of the words which hit me emotionally.
Gyasi’s words are raw, emotional and provoking. This novel is brilliant as it is profound. The scientific and spiritual aspects of the book is masterfully written in a prose so exquisite, I had to read many passages twice, highlighting and then listening to it on audio. I just cannot get enough!
Audiobook Review: The narrator really captured Yaa Gyasi’s words. Turpin embodied and brought to life the characters from Gifty’s grit and determination, to her mother’s desperation and depression.
Yaa Gyasi has written two novels to date and they differ in so many ways. I absolutely loved Homegoing so when I heard Transcendent Kingdom was being released I knew I had to get my hands on it. It had a lot to live up to and it did.
Unlike Homegoing, Transcendent Kingdom is written from the first person perspective. The main character, Gifty, is a women of Ghanaian decent who is writing her doctoral thesis at Stanford University. She is studying reward-seeking behaviour in mice and looking at how one might be able to extrapolate the results to apply to the study of addiction and depression in humans. Her brother is a star athlete who falls victim to opiates after an ankle injury. Her mother is a home health care worker who often works double shifts and hides precious food to make it go farther in the household.
After losing her son to an opioid overdose, Gifty’s mother enters a deep depressive episode. Gifty takes her mother in and tries her best to care for her while also working at the lab each day. Moving between the present day and memories of growing up in a Pentecostal church in Alabama, Gifty tries to parse her life that she knows, from one of faith and belief, and the science that she has dedicated her life to. These contending ideas form the basis of the novel.
With short chapters and a narrow focus the novel is a quick read. Having a degree in psychology and having completed several courses in neuropsychology, the science was easy for me to follow. The author takes what can be a fairly complicated topic and makes it easy to understand. The parallels between Gifty’s work and her family life were well fleshed out and rewarding.
I finished this book last night. It’s quite a thoughtful book that tears at your heartstrings. Gifty lost her older brother to a heroin overdose and her mother has suffered for years with depression. Gifty is studying neuroscience at Stanford. She thinks understanding the brain will help her understand addiction and depression. She was raised in a religious house so there is religion in the book and Gifty has gotten away from her faith as she learns the science of things. This was a beautiful book of loss, hope, and just trying to understand life.
This is the first book I have read by Yaa Gyasi whis I won as a giveaway on Goodreads. I could totally relate to the story of Gifty and her family who go through lot of hardships making their living in Alabama after moving from Ghana and adapting to a new culture. My heart went out to Gifty and her mother as Gifty’s dad abandons them and moves back to Ghana and then Gifty loosing her brother to drug addiction. Gifty is left to deal with her moms depression along with her own sadness to overcome. Gifty doesn’t quit and engrosses her life into medical research. Yaa Gyaasi has done a wonderful job in telling this story of faith hope and a wonderful insight into human behavior.
Beautifully written about addiction, depression, science and questioning faith packed into one amazing book. The characters are easily relatable to current times and I’m sure will touch many hearts. I’m excited to find this beautiful author and to go back and read her other book Homegoing.
Audiobook… read by the brilliant Bahni Turpin
Yaa Gyasi is insanely talented!!
This book shimmers from start to finish! Loved, loved, loved it!!!
Highly addictive enjoyable novel.
It’s hilarious and intimate…
sad but bouncy ….
Contemporary American life – dealing with issues of immigration, a Ghanaian family— from Alabama to California—
a look at education, God, Faith, science, religion,
growing up ( funny bone laughs), dating,
loneliness, loss, grief, addiction, mental health issues of depression (without the reader getting depressed), trips down memory lane, psychologically astute….
an array of
lushly woven tapestries of intoxicating – translucent –
seductive storytelling treasures!
Captivating with imperfect characters —
One moment I was laughing out loud — and in the next my little heart hurt.
Many creative juicy scenes are emotionally felt.
….From a naked egg experiment with corn syrup to learn the principles of osmosis….
….To a date at The Tofu House in Palo Alto ….
….A party at a lab partners house ….
….There are many precious jewels in this wonderful world of fiction.
Yaa Gyasi is becoming a favorite author!!!
From Alabama to California— rich and fully alive!!!
5 strong stars *****