´At night, Esi dreamed that if they all cried in unison, the mud would turn to river and they could be washed away into Atlantic´.



´Evil is like a shadow. It follows you´.



Human history across century has plenty of examples of the tragedies humans would inflict to each other. The amount of trauma carried on from a generation to another is hard to evaluate and the ways in which affects everyday life cannot be easily evaluated.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is following a family history which starts in the 18th century in nowadays Ghana until the 21st century America. Effia and Esi are the two sisters whose genealogy is pursued through a tragical history, stained with the blood of the slave trade. 

This cruel trade involved not only the colonial powers of the USA, the British Empire, the Dutch or the Portuguese, but was greatly supported by local actors who maintained the slave market and Homegoing is largely acknowleding this historical fact. The beginning of the story is largely taking part in this context and in my opinion is the most elaborated and coherent from the whole story. Violent encounters do outline the story and separate and connect characters and life encounters. 

This narrative unity is largely lost in the next installments of the story, once we advance through the current historical and political momentum. The characters themselves are diluted and there are too many directions to follow - personal events in the life of the characters, political events and social outrage - to keep the story together. Technically speaking, unless one wants to create a big saga covering several volumes, it is impossible to focus properly within such an enormous time span. It is like you try playing a symphony by using only one, maximum 2 instruments.

But as the skin-based discrimination remains, so it is the strength of love which unites the main characters that are following the genealogy of the two sisters. It is not the romantic love or the hopeless love, but the enduring one, which is as strong as the pain inflicted by the lack of freedom and pure racial hate.

It took me a very long time to read Homegoing. I´ve started two years ago, then gave up, than started again while carefully reviewing my notes. I am aware that I must add some additional historical reading about the history of Ghana and the slave trade in general, therefore my focus is mostly on the aspects related to the literary side of the story.

Meanwhile the Ghana-born Yaa Gyasi published her second book, Transcendent Kingdom which is using the same historical and cultural context of her country of birth, that I am interested to read as well, therefore I better upgrade my bibliography.

Once in a while a novel such as Homecoming by Yaa Gyasi makes its way on to your reading list. It is beautiful, evocative and descriptive. Following two half sisters and their family members through generations, this a picture of a changing world, families and fortunes. 

Highly recommeded.

Homegoing was an excellent book  that engrosses the reader and invites her  to get absorbed in a completely new word. Strongly recommend.

Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Three Stars

I hold my hands up and say I got to 25% in this book and, while I think it was great and important and I was enjoying it, the story was just so slow. There's so much information, and so many connections and relationships and context that my brain got overwhelmed when it was mixed with a very dense but gradual plotline. If you like in-depth bloodlines, African history, deep prose then I would recommend picking this up - the overwhelming flood of praise of this book backs me up. It's just too slow and full to the brim of information for me at the moment.

This story follows the generations of two half-sisters who were separated (one married to a British slaver and the other sold into slavery) and it's told from the point of view of one child from each generation.

It's an exhausting read, because Yaa Gyasi talks about slavery and colonialism, and therefore there is violence, rape, and murder. However, it's also a very important and powerful book.

A gripping read that spans several generations starting with two half sisters who don't know each other exists and the completely different directions their lives lead and the lives of their children, grandchildren and so on.

One word of advice for this book is make sure you have a copy of the family tree as otherwise things can start to get very confusing very quickly!  That being said once I had a copy of this the lineage of the characters were much easier to understand.

This book made me both laugh and cry but mostly feel quite sad at how people can be treated in such a diabolic and inhumane way.  I can't imagine ever treating anyone or anything the way some of the characters in this book were treated but then for them to be so resilient and strong really astonished me.

Such a thought provoking book that everyone should read.

I received this book free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.  All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

This is definitely quite a gritty and hard book to read, but it is well worth checking out. The author does a fantastic job with rich characterisation and handles hard subjects with sensitivity. It amazes me that the author could fit so much detail and complexity into 300 pages. One small issue I had was the structure of the book as sometimes felt more like a collection of short stories. This meant that at times I was only seeing the surface of the characters but I wanted to see more. Having said that, this is a fantastic debut and I would recommend checking it out.

3.5 stars

Effia and Esi have never met but are sisters. Their lives go in different directions - one marries a slave trader, the other is sold into slavery. 
Homegoing follows Effia and Esi's families for several generations and as they live their lives across different continents. 

Homegoing was an emotional, thought-provoking read.
I enjoyed following Effia and Esi's families and seeing what happened to them, most of which was sad. 
Reading the parts about the slave trade was upsetting. It's terrible to think that it actually happened.
The writing style was easy to follow and in a way I liked that we only saw snippets of each character's life, but I also wanted to find out more about them.
There were a few times where I forgot who was related to who.

Overall this was an unique, enjoyable read that I would recommend.

I don't tend to read books (or watch films) about slavery by choice. I know my history, (or at least try to learn as much as is possible), but it gets to a point when reading books on the subject, and watching film after film, becomes tiresome and often painful. Even more so when so many of the stories told are from an American perspective. Which is why I was initially reluctant to read Homegoing. 

However, this was a beautifully crafted, journey of a book. It wonderfully tells the beginnings of the slave trade through two sisters (unknown to each other) in the Gold Coast of Ghana and spans out telling the story of their descendants in Ghana and the USA, respectively; brilliantly portraying the deep and lasting effects of the slave trade, still present in society.

Possibly due to the ebook copy that I had, I struggled a little to keep track of the family tree and how it grew, as paragraphs from one generation flowed into another. But I loved the way the later pages captured the sense of 'otherness', of belonging to a country or a culture, but not really knowing how you fit in.

*I received a copy of Homegoing via Netgalley for review purposes*

I was hoping that this would be something new but unfortunately it just seemed to be a mismatch of all other dystopian novels mixed in a bad way. I saw nothing original and the characters were a bit flat - disappointing.

I wanted to read this book as it was  our Waterstones Book of the Month.  ( I am a bookseller for Waterstones)

It is a book about slavery in all its evil forms but also about the legacy of slavery which continues to the present day.


The structure sounds co0mplicated in that it follows 2 branches of the same Ghanaian family. One branch of the family remains in Ghana whilst the other branch end up being transported as slaves to America (some horrific accounts of the Fort where the people were imprisoned before the equally horrific voyage)

However, the skilful author managed to make each chapter with its different narrator distinctive enough that the reader doesn’t get confused. I don’t know if the printed copy includes a family tree, as I would have found it interesting to map each chapter against it.

Like Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railway”, the style is almost journalistic and non- sensationalist despite the awful things which are being described. She doesn’t shy away from portraying her characters’ darker sides- e.g. drug taking.

This is a book about the uses and misuses of power, about history but most of all about people.

It’s a great achievement and should be read by everyone.

This is probably my favourite book I've read this year. It follows the lineage of two African women and their very different destinies. I didn't know what to expect when I started to read it and it's a bit difficult to explain, but it was absolutely beautiful. It was touching above all. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a good read about the slavery trade, about race, about family and about courage.

It is undeniable that <b>«Homegoing»</b> must be included in school literature program! Yaa Gyasi created the most emotional novel. It all started with two half sisters, Effia and Esi, in XVIII century Ghana and then followed generation after generation until our days, and saw the true power of family, of the past, of history.

I would not be lying if I said that I’ve never read anything more beautiful, heart-wracking and touching. She was able to grip my heart and shatter it times and times again, as every new generation went through a series of struggles, poised by the historical settings at that particular time.

Yaa Gyasi has a very beautiful, lyrical voice that made me tear up on multiple occasions.

We followed Effia’s and Esi’s descendants, one family living in Ghana, another living in America. Different destinies, different fates but the slavery and slave trade affected both generation trees.

We saw how tribes in Ghana stood up and fought against the foreign domination. We saw how slavery was abolished in America, but never to its fullest. How difficult it was for a black man and woman to live in a society that believed them inferior.

From all the books that I read about slavery and racism, this one left the biggest impression. It made me want to know and learn more. It made me want to research if the facts presented in books corresponded to actual historical facts, and most of them did!

This isn't just a novel, it's a powerful essay, an investigation into the impact of slavery. 

It starts in Ghana, with a young woman being sold into marriage to a white slaver, just as her half sister is sold into slavery and sent to America. We are taken through snapshots of the lives of their descendants each generation from then until now. It's brutal, sad (I'm crying writing this review) and is an unflinching look at the way the disgusting slave trade shaped nations. 

It's an immense feat, and powerful. The characters are all compelling, and every time one story ended to go to a new generation I was genuinely sad to leave them as each one could have been a novel alone. The later stories are not as riveting as the first 3/4, but they are still strong. The writing is deft and accomplished, and I could barely put this down. 

It touches on the lingering, vile taint that slavery has left without holding back any punches. Highly recommended.

The concept behind Homegoing is fascinating. It begins with two half-sisters born in 18th century Ghana. One sister is married off to a white man involved in the slave trade and she lives in the relative luxury of the Cape Coast Castle. The other is captured and transported to America as a slave. The book follows the stories of the sisters’ descendants across continents and centuries. Although the horrific history being showcased doesn’t make for easy reading, the writing rolls beautifully and Yaa Gyasi introduces us to intriguing characters and atmospheric locations throughout. 
However the scope that makes this debut novel so compelling is what also frustrates. With each chapter moving on to a new descendant, the book feels more like a collection of short stories than a novel. In fact, this book reminded me why I don’t generally read short stories as, each time I connected with a character and began to invest in their story, it would abruptly finish and leave me annoyed at the lack of closure. Jumping decades and continents at the turn of a page also left me struggling to keep track of the family tree and eventually I lost interest in beginning the following chapter, unwilling to put in the effort to read another difficult story and engage with another character as I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied before their disappearance.
I will be watching out for any future novels by Yaa Gyasi and would definitely read her work again but the style and scope of this novel was not for me.  Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Books (UK) who provided me with a copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.

This is a blistering, beautiful and heartbreaking novel of a family history between two different women whose lives intertwine. It's incredibly well written and easy to follow, whilst managing to be poetic and lyrical in its prose at the same time. 

'Homegoing' is a novel of epic proportions that follows two families through generation to generation, beginning in Ghana during the years of European colonists operating the slave trade and heading through slavery in the United States, the Civil War, the Depression, Civil Rights and right up to the modern day, where the two families are connected once again as they were at the very beginning of the book. 

I really enjoyed this novel, but it strikes me that one line in it seemed to personify my experience of it. One of the character's, Marjorie, is discussed as 'trying to find books that touched her inside' (I'm paraphrasing) and I feel like many readers are involved in a very similar pursuit. And though I was waiting for this book to give me something to think about, something to stay with me, it missed that target just a little. 

The writing was beautiful and lyrical, and though I had some obvious issues with the fixation on women and their bodies in the earlier chapters because I felt they were incredibly objectifying and in some cases, unnecessary for the overall story, it was a genuinely interesting, well-researched read. I think perhaps I'd believed the hype that this book would change my life and it didn't hit the mark, but it was a very good book.

Homegoing is Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel and offers a powerful exploration of the effects of colonialism. Gyasi has written an unflinching and raw account of slavery and racism, and does not shy away from the brutal reality of the plantations.

Homegoing tells the story of two sisters, Effia, and Esi who were separated at birth. One is sold into slavery, while one is a slave trader’s wife. The consequences of their fate have a long-lasting impact on the generations that follow. Gyasi takes us from the Gold Coast of Africa to the cotto-picking plantations of the American South, to missionary schools in Ghana and to dive bars in Harlem. The story spans continents and generations.

When I picked up this book and began to read I wasn’t sure what to expect, after all this is Gyasi’s debut novel, the narrative jumps between characters and places, skipping time at an almost alarming rate.

Gyasi has written an epic and although the story telling is masterful, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the sheer scope of the novel. The switch between characters and generations is not always immediately clear which can get confusing, and it is sometimes difficult to follow the lineage of the characters – I had to keep flicking back to the family tree.

Despite this, Homegoing should be read, it may be a difficult read at times, but it is worthwhile. Individual chapters can almost be read as short stories – you could dip in and out and each individual character’s story would still have an almost imperceptible and profound impact on you.

With thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Books (UK).

This is a powerful and unflinching exploration of slavery and racism told through the destinies of two sisters whose lives follow very different paths. It’s an important and valuable addition to the literature of black history, epic in scope, and often very moving and shocking. However, its ambition sometimes outpaces the narrative and the sheer number of characters and storylines occasionally  becomes confusing and overwhelming. There’s no central thread to anchor the reader and the disjointed plot makes for a challenging read. Worthwhile, perhaps, but not always very enjoyable.

Homegoing is an ambitious but well written debut which covers three hundred years of history from multiple viewpoints. The story is a fascinating and often emotional journey through the history of two families starting with two half sisters destined never to meet, one married to an English slave-trader, the other sold into slavery. Some of the descriptions, particularly those of the female slaves in the castle basement, were hard to read but incredibly powerful. 

It was a little difficult to connect with the characters at times given that they changed almost every chapter and I wasn’t always clear which half of the family I was reading about. The novel is really made up of multiple short stories with a connecting thread but some of these felt a little glossed over, particularly in the second half of the book. 

Overall though this is a fantastic debut. An epic family saga told in only 300 pages. Highly recommended.

I seriously can't express how much I loved this book. I had no expectations for it and it still completely blew me away.

each story was beautiful. short but still incredibly filled with detail and emotion. I couldn't help but want to learn more and more about these people. the writing was so fable-like, it completely lulled me into the stories. I still can't believe this is a debut novel!! also, this is not only a entertaining read but also very educational about colonialism, slavery and america. 

the only thing I was kinda meh about was the ending. it seemed a bit... I'm not sure what to say but it wasn't satisfying enough or how I felt the journey to that point should have ended. I guess I was expecting something a bit more... epic. but maybe that wasn't the point. still, it didn't tore down my love for this book even one bit. it's possibly one of my favourites of the year already.