Transcendent Kingdom

If you’re like me, you’ve been waiting for Yaa Gyasi’s second novel ever since finishing Homegoing three years ago. And oh man did she deliver with Transcendent Kingdom. The story focuses on Gifty, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford researching addiction. We learn, over the course of the story, that Gifty’s older brother Nana died of a heroin overdose, and her mother is suicidal and in a deep depression. Gifty’s work is largely to understand the why of addiction. She is, as the book description says, “determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.” It’s also the story of Ghanian immigrants living in rural Alabama, of evangelical Christianity, and of a fractured family. What struck me the most, however, was the meditations on faith and science and reconciling belief systems with learning about the way the world works.

Much of Gyasi’s own self is in Gifty. As she told NPR, “You know, similarly to Gifty, I grew up Pentecostal. I was raised in the church, as they say, but I haven't continued to attend, and have kind of lost a lot of that early grounding that I had as I grew older and started to feel kind of politically differently than some of the teachings that I learned when I was younger. And yet I think when you spend that much time in a place — and so it really was such a huge part of my life. And it's something I found that even as I've grown distant from that, I can't completely disentangle who I am from this early period.”

Gifty struggles to reconcile her faith, her belief, with the work she is doing. And that central tension is what makes Transcendent Kingdom so effective— and powerful— to read.

Rating: ★★★★★