And, yeah, it's harder to explain what that loss is, but it's one that I carry. And what you miss out on by not being surrounded by people who look like you is a quality that's harder to qualify, harder to talk about. But to know that just eight miles down the road, there was an all-Black school that was graduating its students at an abysmal rate, I think, really, really showed me the fact that not all schools in this country are equal, not by a long shot. And to see all of these young people from Alabama doing this, I think, was really encouraging. My graduating class sent students to Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Brown. And when I was there, my high school was one of the best high schools in the country - and you could tell.

I was very fortunate to have the education that I had. On feeling conflicted about her parents' decision to send her to a majority white school in Alabama And I think in some ways it was their children who had to kind of lead the charge in helping them to understand how important race is here in America. I think having come from a country where everyone was the same race as them, race just wasn't a factor that they really valued or that they thought about too frequently. ( From the publisher.I think they couldn't really think of themselves in any other way. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasís phenomenal debut. 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. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.īut 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.

Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on Ox圜ontin. Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction.

Yaa Gyasí'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.

Homegoing yaa gyasi sparknotes