Born in Ghana and brought up in Alabama, Yaa Gyasi was only 25 when she published her first book. Homegoing (2016), a historical novel about the slave trade in west Africa, won several prestigious literary prizes including the 2017 PEN/Hemingway award.
Her second novel is rather different. Set in an evangelical Christian community in modern-day Alabama, Transcendent Kingdom tells the story of a Ghanaian immigrant family whose lives are touched by tragedy. Its narrator, Gifty, recounts a succession of traumatic events: her father walks out on the family and returns to Ghana; her brother, Nana, a talented basketball player, gets addicted to painkillers after suffering a ligament injury, moves on to heroin and dies of an overdose; her mother, a no-nonsense matriarch who believes mental illness is “an invention of the West”, falls into a catatonic depression.
The shock of bereavement prompts a crisis of faith. After overhearing two churchgoers making racially offensive remarks about her late brother, Gifty wonders: “Where was God in all of this?” She embarks on a career in neuroscience “to work through all of my misunderstandings about his addiction and all of my shame”. The narrative is punctuated with scientific explainers; these are juxtaposed with soul-searching ruminations on theology, rehearsing the age-old tussle between science and religion. “Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing,” Gifty reflects, “but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.”
Transcendent Kingdom is competently crafted — Gyasi’s prose is crisp and clear, and the story’s disparate strands are neatly interwoven.
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Viking £14.99 pp256
