A Signed First Edition Club Recommendation
"Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing follows a family history full of the blips and gaps those spit-in-a-vial ancestry tests can't quite bridge. There's something exhilarating about tracking the way an oft-dehumanized people's successes and failures—shared or individual, slight or immense—change the landscape of a lineage on a genetic map, and Gyasi does it carefully, letting readers plant roots where each of her characters tread. When I finished this book, I realized I'd been waiting my entire life to read it."
Publisher Vintage
Publication Date 2017-05-02
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / Archived Staff Suggestions / Ashley T.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781101971062
Winner of the PEN/ Hemingway Award
Winner of the NBCC's John Leonard Award
Shortlisted for the British Book Award - Debut of the Year
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, Time, Oprah.com, Harper’s Bazaar, San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Esquire, Elle, Paste, Entertainment Weekly, the Skimm, PopSugar, Minneapolis Star Tribune, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, Financial Times
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.
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.
