Main character is socially awkward and full of questions that she wants answers to ….but avoids answering all questions directed at her. 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. Gyasi's constraint renders the emotional impact of the novel all the more powerful: her descriptions of the casual racism endured by the family, particularly at the hands of their nearly all-white church in Alabama, is more chilling for being so matter-of-fact.

The narrative moves smoothly between the present and Gifty's childhood, with episodes such as a summer spent in Ghana with her aunt during a previous phase of her mother's depression rising in the background while Gifty works her way up in her field. Though she now determinedly puts her faith in science, Gifty still feels the pull of her evangelical upbringing, and she struggles to reconcile the two opposing belief systems while juggling her dissertation and care for her mother, plus a growing attraction to her awkward lab mate. Her project is motivated by the fate of her beloved older brother who died from a heroin overdose when she was in high school, and by the condition of her depressed mother, who is staying at Gifty's apartment. Gifty, the only member of the family born in the United States, is six years into a doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford, where she is attempting to see if she can alter the neural pathways leading to addiction and depression. Gyasi's meticulous, psychologically complex second novel (after Homegoing) examines the consequences of a Ghanian family's immigration to Huntsville, Ala. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's 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. 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. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. 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 Gyasi'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. A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK!.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi