Her first novel Homegoing, published in 2016, won Gyasi the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” honors for 2016, and the American Book Award. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I visited Yale with Marina Keegan in The Opposite of Loneliness, time traveled to the 1980s AIDS epidemic in Chicago in The Great Believers, and took a whirlwind trip to Ghana, Alabama, and California with my good friend Gifty, a character in Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi. Gyasi, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. This year’s Go Big Read book was written by author, Yaa Gyasi. She's 28, and six years into her PhD in neuroscience at.

Gifty is the star of Yaa Gyasi's new novel Transcendent Kingdom. Transcendent Kingdom was recently longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction as well as the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her mother, from Ghana, lives with her, but mostly under the covers. This story also addresses issues with immigration and reconciling different cultures, race, and family. Throughout the book, Gifty grapples with understanding and reconciling her work in the hard sciences with her religious upbringing while also dealing with her depressed mother, who is living in Gifty’s bed, and the remaining trauma of losing her brother Nana to a heroin overdose. Transcendent Kingdom follows the story of Gifty, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine who studies reward-seeking behavior in mice as it relates to depression and addiction. Now that we have announced our awesome Go Big Read book for 2021-2022, here’s a little more about the book and it’s author, Yaa Gyasi.

Transcendent kingdom by yaa gyasi