Yaa Gyasi: Transcendent Kingdom, Knopf (Penguin Random House USA), 9781524711771, C format paperback

Yaa Gyasi’s follow up novel to her exceptional debut “Homegoing” which I absolutely loved is made up of very different material.   “Transcendent Kingdom” deals with loss, depression, addiction, grief, science, religious faith and unmanageable hurt that tore at my heart and moved me very much,  sometimes I had to put it down.  One of the reasons I hesitated to pick up this novel was that I too had a mother suffering with severe depression and the experience of this will always be raw.  But Gyasi is such a fine, brilliant writer, her prose so vivid and exquisite – it was worth it to have read this heart wrenching story.  

The novel centers around Gifty who is a PhD candidate in neuroscience studying reward seeking behavior associated with addictions hoping to find answers in science real life is refusing her. Her mother, an evangelical Christian, immigrated to the US from Ghana to create a better life for her children only to have her husband, the Chin Chin man, return to Ghana leaving her to raise their children Nana and Gifty by herself.  The downward spiral for her family begins, when Gifty’s brother Nana, a promising teenage basketball player insures his ankle and is put on OxyContin, setting him up for years of addiction and finally,  after the families desperate struggle to save him, ending in an overdose death.  The loss of her son sends her mother into severe depression from which she never recovers creating a double loss for Gifty of the two people she loved. 

Gyasi describes Gifty’s feelings of watching beloved family members drifting off into addiction and depression and the feeling of helplessness with such sensitivity and so vividly, it feels like she is familiar with losing someone close under similar circumstances.  For me it was an emotionally hard book to read sometimes but written so beautifully and sensitively it will be one of these books whose characters will resonate with me for a quite some time .