A good read for the weekend: “Transcendent Kingdom”
Looking for a good book to read? This week Moonshot suggests Yaa Gyasi’s new novel “Transcendent Kingdom”, about a young scientist trying to understand her family’s pain.
Yaa Gyasi’s follow-up to her acclaimed best seller “Homegoing” is a powerful, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama, ravaged by depression, addiction and grief.
Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed.
Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But 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.
Yaa Gyasi sets up the tension between science and faith as the framework for Gifty’s internal battle, as well as the novel’s subtle tonal shifts between lyricism and intellectualism.
“Transcendent Kingdom” is a deeply moving novel about faith, science, religion and love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut.
The book is among the 6 shortlisted novels for Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021.
You can also read: “Libertie – A Novel”
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