Homegoing

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A story that spans three centuries in Ghana and along the way becomes a genuinely great American novel, with a stunning scope and emotional force. Homegoing marks the emergence of a significant new voice in modern literature. It is remarkable for its beautiful language, its unwavering grief, its soaring beauty, and its massive portrayal of the forces that build families and countries.

In Ghana in the eighteenth century, two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into separate communities. Effia lives well in the opulent chambers of Cape Coast Castle after being married off to an Englishman. Effia is unaware that her sister Esi is held captive underneath her in the dungeons of the castle, sold into the thriving Gold Coast slave trade along with hundreds of other people, and transported to America to be reared as a slave by her children and grandchildren. One storyline in Homegoing follows the ancestors of Effia through centuries of conflict in Ghana as the Asante and Fante peoples struggle with British colonisation and the slave trade. The second thread travels to America with Esi and her kids. Homegoing makes history visceral and captures, with unique and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation, from the plantations of the South through the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, and all the way up to the present.

Yaa Gyasi's seminal first book pits a person's destiny against the irrevocable passage of time, generation after generation, creating enduring characters whose lives were moulded by historical events beyond their control. Homegoing is a fantastic book written by a young author who is really talented; it is highly recommended.