Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her debut novel, Homegoing, published in 2016, won her several awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, and the American Book Award. Transcendent Kingdom (Knopf) is a moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression, addiction and grief — a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, once a gifted high school athlete, died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. But even as Gifty turns to science to unlock the mystery of her family’s suffering, she hungers for her childhood faith. Its promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Publishers Weekly praised it as “Meticulous, psychologically complex…At once a vivid evocation of the immigrant experience and a sharp delineation of an individual’s inner struggle, the novel brilliantly succeeds on both counts.”