I loved reading Yaa Gyasi's debut “Homegoing” so much that I felt a slight sense of trepidation picking up her second novel “Transcendent Kingdom”. Could it live up to the quality of the first book? The answer is yes, but it also surprised me because it's a very different novel and a more self contained story of family life. Instead of creating an expansive saga about multiple generations as she did in her debut, this new novel is about the collapse of one particular family until only the narrator is left. We know this from the beginning and it's riveting and moving to gradually learn how this promising young woman comes to be left all alone. It's also a story that gives an impactful personal take on larger issues. There have been many books about the tensions between religion and science, but “Transcendent Kingdom” eloquently ponders it from a unique perspective asserting “this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false.” Narrator Gifty had a strict Christian upbringing and now studies neuroscience. Using lab mice she researches the mysterious workings of the brain and whether hard-wired behaviour can be altered within all that grey matter. Her work is primarily motivated by a need to find answers about why she lost members of her family to drug addiction and depression. Of course, there's no easy answers but she also meaningfully considers the psychological and sociological factors at play. It's a tremendously meaningful story that completely gripped me.

The question of faith can't be so easily dismissed when someone is raised to whole-heartedly believe in a certain religion. Gifty certainly sees through the hypocrisy and frequent misinterpretations of the Bible as practiced in the Alabaman community she was raised in. However, Christian practice and belief is a deeply encoded part of her personality so that she feels “'I believe in God, I do not believe in God.' Neither of these sentiments felt true to what I actually felt.” She's experienced the brutal way that some people use religion to justify their own prejudices (whether that's Christians in Alabama or Christians in Ghana) as well as the intolerant attitudes of budding young students who dismiss any notion of religious belief. It frequently leaves Gifty feeling painfully isolated as her distinctive sensibility doesn't allow her to feel like a part of either of these groups. These attitudes also don't reflect the way religion was practiced by her family in their home – especially in times of crisis. It leads her to the complex notion that “My soul is still my soul, even if I rarely call it that.”

It's moving how the narrative becomes a reckoning with the self as the story is interspersed with pieces from a diary Gifty kept growing up. These are her conversations with God where she desperately asks unanswerable questions but they're also a thoughtful attempt to understand the world around her. The tenderness of this child self paired alongside the more hardened solitary scientist she is today creates a heartbreaking picture of a sympathetically lonely woman. Therefore the defensive, withholding way she conducts her personal and romantic relationships (with men and women) makes sense and I felt for her stance. The circumstances she grew up in and her self consciousness about society's superficial assumptions also means that she ardently wants to be viewed as an individual freed from identity labels: “I didn't want to be thought of as a woman in science, a black woman in science. I wanted to be thought of as a scientist, full stop”.

I was very struck by the tense relationship with her brother Nana who becomes addicted to opioids after he sustains a sports injury. The story portrays the agonizing pain of trying and failing to help a loved one overcome addiction. But it also confronts the attitudes surrounding drug addiction and how it's often connected in the US with racial prejudice. Gyasi is quite rightly excoriating about the behaviour of the community that celebrates Nana's athletic achievements and coldly turns their back on him when he becomes entangled in addiction and can no longer play basketball. This judgemental attitude is something Gifty wrestles with herself reflecting how “I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.” This reminded me of the continuing stigmas fostered by America's “war on drugs” as described in “Chasing the Scream” by Johann Hari. Gifty comes to understand the suffocating social factors which encourage Nana's addiction and contribute his tragic downward spiral. The legacy of shame she feels from this is powerfully depicted.

This is a brilliantly accomplished novel which is captivating in the way it shows the methodical way its narrator searches for answers to complex, deeply-felt questions.

There's something about a well-told family saga that I find so immersive and emotionally moving. It gives not only a powerful sense of people's lineage with aspects of personality, physical traits and heirlooms passed through those generations, but also the movement of time. By following the flow of passing generations in a way that we're unable to locked in the immediacy of our own lives, we're keyed into what might have been, the struggles endured and the sacrifices made so that we can live. Novels can anchor these stories of multiple generations in larger themes about the way society has changed over the years as in Neel Mukherjee's “The Lives of Others” which portrays the impact the Naxalite movement in Bengal had upon one family, Matthew Thomas's “We Are Not Ourselves” which shows the lasting effect of alcoholism in an Irish immigrant family in NYC, Sara Taylor's “The Shore” which shows the transformation of an island over many generations and Joyce Carol Oates' “Bellefleur” which gives a sense of capitalism's connection to the American dream. Now, Yaa Gyasi has created such an inventive well-written debut novel which follows the lineage of two African sisters separated at birth and the history of the slave trade over centuries.

One thing I find so moving about a family saga like this is the way it conveys the tremendous fragility of life and importance of personal choices. Not only do these things affect an individual's destiny, but also the destiny of all the generations which will proceed that person. This shows how the element of chance has such a strong impact upon the world. It's observed at one point “How easy it was for a life to go one way instead of another.” “Homegoing” really begins with a calamitous event which sees two sisters separated – one grows up in a semi-prosperous family where the daughter is promised in marriage to a powerful man and the other belongs to a tribe where she's captured and forced into slavery. It's only through a twist of fate that one thrives and the other suffers horribly. But just because the progeny of these women were born in particular circumstances doesn't mean they are fated to a certain path in life. Through acts of will the subsequent generations shape their own fates and fortunes which consequently heavily influence their own children.

Even though Gyasi follows the individual stories of more than a dozen members of this family through the centuries I was so impressed how it never felt overwhelming or confusing. It's a mark of a great writer that can introduce characters who feel fully formed and already familiar. This is true not only for the family members but also many notable periphery characters including Cudjo (an athletic man with latent same-sex desires) and Esther (a wonderfully garrulous woman who coaxes a historian to express his emotions more). The narrative switches back and forth between each subsequent generation of the sisters' family lines. Many stories build a sense of suspense as you discover the fates of the previous generations during the course of each new family member's story. Key objects such as two stones given to the sisters at the beginning travel through the generational lines as well as songs which are passed down from one child to the next. The initial meaning of an object or song might be lost, but the connection to that family history remains. Certain images also poignantly recur over the stories; it's observed of one early family member Fiifi that “he wore his silence like a golden crown” and then, many generations later, a woman named Willie sings “I shall wear a crown”. These references all add tremendously to the pleasure of the overarching story which the reader is keyed into when the characters are not.

It's fascinating learning particular details about the history of warring tribes (primarily the Asantes and Fantes tribes) in Ghana and how some tribes worked with the white colonialists to capture and sell slaves. A physical colonial castle in Ghana (Cape Coast Castle) which the slave trade was facilitated through becomes a focal point for the families involved in this story. In a way it takes on a fairy tale quality like Bluebeard's castle where some inhabitants live a privileged life unaware or wilfully ignorant of the horrors within the locked subterranean dungeons which hold many captured black people waiting to be sold into slavery in America and the Caribbean. This castle has subsequently become a significant destination where people from the Americas and Britain return to in order to contemplate the significant rift in identity which is colonialism and slavery's legacy. It's a fascinating coincidence that a visit to this same castle also takes place in Zadie Smith's recent novel “Swing Time”. The fact of this historic structure really drives home the reality of the true horrors and long-lasting impact of slavery. Both authors show the quixotic feelings this landmark induces for visitors in contemplating our connection to that history, but also the way it is ultimately unknowable to us.

I had the pleasure of meeting Yaa Gyasi last September at a literary salon in The Savoy.

Later generations meaningfully explore the legacy of slavery in America in particular and its history of racial conflict. When British slavery comes to an end, it's observed how “They would just trade one type of shackles for another, physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.” Gyasi powerfully shows how this legacy is borne out over generations leading to disproportionate amounts of black people in America experiencing poverty, discrimination and imprisonment. It leads one character to find that “he knew in his body even if he hadn't yet put it together in his mind: in America, the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.” The novel portrays the consequences of this state of being and conveys what an important influence the past has upon the present.

Yaa Gyasi is an incredibly powerful storyteller and I found the novel as a whole utterly gripping. However, even though I think the transitions from one story to the next are graceful and each family member is compellingly well-rounded in their own right, I found some stories more effective than others. In particular, the story of one woman's move to Harlem with her light-skinned husband who can pass as white felt too compressed and fast-moving to me. It seemed that this particular story needed an entire novel of its own to fully flesh out the conflicts it explores and the conclusions it comes to. But, on the whole, most of the stories work as single pieces in the grand puzzle of this dynamic and fascinating family. I grew really attached to some characters and wished the novel would stay with them longer, but the momentum of moving from one generation to the next creates a thrilling story in itself making me ultimately glad that Gyasi structured the novel in this way. As already observed from many sources after its much-lauded publication in America last year, “Homegoing” is a tremendously accomplished and intelligent debut.