Most books like this feature three generations. This book, however, is possibly the most ambitious family saga I have ever read. Spending so long with the same family, watching them grow through the years and seeing their children face their own problems - it just feels so personal. yeah, they are some of my favourite kind of stories. Those epic tales spanning generations and pulling you into the lives of so many interesting characters. I recently said in my review of East of Eden that I love family sagas. How the author managed to create such rich characters, cover so much history, and tell such a complex, but compelling story in only 300 pages, I do not know. Homegoing is an incredible and horrific look at history, colonialism and slavery in Ghana and America, across 250 years. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.”Ĥ 1/2 stars. “What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer. Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control.

From the plantations of the South to 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, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America.

One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. An alternate cover edition can be found here.Ī novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel.

Homecoming yaa gyasi