This was such a beautiful yet heartbreaking book. Talks deeply about depression and how it affects us and others around us and how families cope with it. The story is wonderfully and encapsulates the reader.

Transcendent Kingdom is visceral and quiet. Gifty is a young woman working on her PhD in neuroscience, exploring how brains react to addiction. She is caring for her clinically depressed mother and wrestling with a childhood loss. This book is incredible and raw, it's actually emotionally challenging to read, but it is worth every feeling and every turn of a page.

Outstanding. The heartache and heartbreak of being from Ghana in a mostly white town comes through. The grappling with Christianity, the ease with which loved ones succumb to addiction, and the humanity make this book wonderful in the worst sort of way. I loved it as much as Homegoing, but in a very different way.

This book is completely different from Gyasi's debut novel, Homegoing. While Homegoing was an expansive, multigenerational family saga from the Atlantic Slave Trade to 20th century Harlem, Transcendent Kingdom is a tight, orderly story of the way one immigrant family unravels in grief. The comparisons between Gyasi's two books show her range as a storyteller and writer. She brings her Ghanaian heritage to both books in ways that do not make it the focal point.

Utterly amazing. I had been waiting for TK for over a year and read it within 48 hours. I can only hope for more and more, with less wait time ☺️

I'm a big fan of Yaa Gyasi's writing. This did not disappoint. The overlap of science and religion spoke to me in a way I didn't expect.

A few years ago when I read Homegoing I was immediately struck by the abilities of Yaa Gyasi as a writer and knew that I would read anything that she put out. Transcendent Kingdom is a completely different type of novel than her first, but her beautiful writing and ability to write families is still there.

This book focuses on Gifty, a woman pursuing her PHD in Medicine while studying addiction in mice, and her relationship with her mother who has depression and has come to live with her. You then are transported back and forth to the past where you see Gifty's childhood growing up with an absent father and brother who become addicted to drugs.

I was immediately drawn into Gifty's story and felt so connected to her and everything that she was going through. The way that Yaa Gyasi weaves stories of depression, addiction, religion, and science together is masterful and it was hard to leave the story when I had to do something else

Gifty is a scientist who has dedicated her life to trying to understand addiction. At 16, her brother Nana dies of an overdose. Her mom sinks into a deep state of depression and at the mere age of 11, Gifty’s left to deal with the loss of her best friend. She was faced with adversity her entire life. As a native Ghanaian that immigrated to Alabama, she faced a lot of ridicule because of the color of her skin. This shaped her into a person who didn’t feel like she was worth anything. As she struggles with living in a country that doesn’t feel accepting of her family, she’s faced with so many obstacles. She puts all her faith in God, but how could he allow her family to be torn apart by drugs?

The author takes a deeply touching look at addiction, depression, racism, grief, and religion and how it shapes this one woman’s life. The writing is absolutely stunning. While fiction, there are so many truths woven into this story that you’ll need to keep reminding yourself that this is not a memoir.

An amazing novel. Gifty is a great character--funny and smart and sad. Although the novel is fundamentally a story of grief, it avoids sentimentality and cliches.

Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom is completely different from her debut novel, Homegoing, but just as great! Gyasi has crafted a multilayered first-person narrative that explores loss, faith, identity, and racism. Gifty, a neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford, explores her academic ambitions while grieving the loss of her brother to a heroin overdose and caring for a mother struggling with depression. This is a novel readers will think about weeks after finishing it.

I am sorry, I cannot get through this book! I am a full 50% along into the book, and I am completely uninterested in Gifty’s storyline. The neuroscience and lab mice are a thread throughout the story that doesn’t fit for me. There is a story somewhere about Nana and mom and it is simply going nowhere this far into the book. I apologize if I was hoping for another Homegoing (one of the most engaging novels I have ever read!) but I won’t finish Transcendent Kingdom while so many other books are on my shelf. My library has already purchased Transcendent Kingdom, though, as many patrons want to read it.

A lot of topics intersect in Yaa Gyasi's sterling novel: religion, science, immigration, connection, mental health, addiction, and more. But the book never feels crowded and moves along at an easily readable pace. And no matter how many threads Gyasi weaves into her story, none get lost. This is a profound novel about the human experience told effortlessly and with great humanity and respect, balancing our Sisyphean quest for order with the harsh realities of ambiguity. In my mind, this is a deserved frontrunner for the Pulitzer Prize.

*GIFTED* I feel so incredibly lucky to have been *gifted* one of this years most anticipated books - ‘Transcendent Kingdom’ - by the insanely talented Yaa Gyasi - author of the magical ‘Homegoing’. I marvelled and devoured her debut novel and this one did not disappoint either. ‘Transcendent Kingdom’ has multiple layers to it, that I feel as much as I may try, I may not be able to give it the justice it truly deserves but I’ll give it a good go. -
-
-
Gifty is an intelligent, second generation Ghanaian Phd Student, studying neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine, looking at the correlation between reward-seeking behaviour in mice and the links between this, depression and addiction.
-
-
Her drive to do this is triggered by the death of her gifted, high school athlete brother to a heroin overdose, after becoming addicted to the drug OxyContin, a drug given to him when an injury playing basketball leaves him bedridden for months on end.
-
-
His death sends ricochets through her once nuclear family. Her mother falls into a deep depression, leaving Gifty with no choice but to care for her mother - a move that exposes so much of this fragile relationship.
-
-
“My first thought, the year my brother died and my mother took to bed, was that I needed her to be mine again, a mother as I understood it. And when she didn’t get up, when she lay there day in and day out, wasting away, i was reminded that I didn’t know her, not wholly and completely. I would never know her”
-
-
Where religion was once her salvation and answer to all her questions, Gifty grapples with this throughout the book.
-
-
And let us not overlook the impact her brother’s death has also on her.
-
-
“Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper and instead see him as he was in all his glory, in all of his beauty. It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was only my own, the waste was what I missed out whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction”.
-
-
The stand our parts for me were where Gifty transports us into the scientific world that her mind works best in. (Review contd in comments section)

Transcendent Kingdom is an incredibly smart novel about navigating the complexities of faith while maintaining confidence and belief in the material world. It's hard to write about religion without sounding incredibly naïve, or condescending. Gyasi successfully portrays ambiguity, loss, grief, and longing. The book isn't particularly plot driven, and focuses a lot on Gifty's loss of her brother due to a heroine addiction, and its effect on her mother. I found the ending a bit underwhelming. Otherwise, this was beautifully written book that I look forward to recommending to others.

I wasn’t sure anything could truly follow Gyasi’s Homegoing, but this was a pretty amazing book. Gifty is a PhD candidate studying addiction at Stanford and trying to help her mother, a hardworking Ghanaian immigrant, through a major depressive episode. The story switches back and forth from past to present, showing Gifty’s childhood in Alabama with her brother Nana. Nana, a rising basketball star, was injured during a high school game and became addicted to the OxyContin prescribed to him for pain, and eventually overdosing. This led to their mother’s first extended major depressive episode and impacted the path of Gifty’s life. A great and often sad story about family and love and grief.

For big fans of 'Homegoing', this is a good follow-up. To be fair, not better than 'Homegoing.' I liked the journey we took through the narrators ever changing views on various topics (most specifically, faith).

Would you devote a lifetime trying to redeem yourself for a horrible childhood wish? Transcendent Kingdom chronicles Gifty, a first generation Ghanian American, who is trying to do just that. Her career choice is in search of solutions to the problems that severed her family, which includes a father who has abandoned them, fleeing back to Ghana broken by America and its racism; a brother, a star athlete and deep thinker, who lost his life to opiod addiction, and a mother a persistent and stalwart woman who despite her strength suffers with debilitating bouts of depression. Yaa Gyasi's uses very simple prose but the true power of her writing, in my humble opinion, is not the words she choses but the complex ideas and themes that she presents, such as science vs religion, nature vs nurture, restraint vs reward, which she intricately interlaces in the story as she chronicles Gifty's life in a compelling and powerful way. Gyasi's storytelling hits its stride once she really begins to delve into the consequences of Gifty's brother's addiction and how its triggers her mother's mental and emotional decline. Hence, as the veil of Gifty's life slowly lifts for the reader, one understands more clearly why there is this constant tension between science and religion which dominates her thought process and how both are used as coping mechanisms to deal with abandonment of the three most important people in Gifty's life. Transcendent Kingdom is a Ghanian story, an immigrant story, a Black story, an American story and most importantly a human story. It was thought provoking and emotional read, I rate it 4.25 stars.

Yaa Gyasi is such an incredible voice. I love her books. This one is soooo different from HOMEGOING, but was written with a brilliance that it could ONLY be Yaa who wrote it. Truly an incredible, introspective and thoroughly researched book. I adored it!

I really enjoyed Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing so I was really excited for this book. Her prose is beautiful and she weaves an intricate quilt of the stories of Gifty and her family through life in California, Alabama and Ghana, along with threads covering addiction, neuroscience, depression, race, religion and spirituality. I felt like the book got off to a slow start but by the end, I couldn't put it down, so I would definitely call it a bit of a slow burn (even though it's not romance). Gifty's internal dialogue was one of my favorite parts of the book. This book reminded me slightly of Saeed Jones' book (memoir, acutally), How We Fight For Our Lives, mainly due to the prominence of the child-mother relationship. I would recommend this to a broad range of people; I think there's something in it for many.

In her brilliantly executed sophomore novel, Yaa Gyasi asks readers to follow the protagonist’s internal journey as Gifty struggles to reconcile her religious upbringing with her scientific research after her mother falls into a deep depression.

Gifty is a talented scientist working on a Ph.D. in neuroscience as she studies the brain to try to understand if the brain can be trained to not want something it has grown addicted to. As Gifty tries to care for her mother who has been shipped from Alabama to Gifty’s small student apartment in California, she finds herself forced to think about her family and her childhood.

Gifty was raised by her Ghanaian immigrant parents and lived in the shadow of her talented and beloved older brother, Nana. With a distant father who abandoned her and Nana’s drug addiction, Gifty clung to her mother’s deep love of God to provide some stability in her life.

“Transcendent Kingdom” examines addiction, depression, immigration, racism, religion and science in a beautifully fluid manner that educates the reader while keeping them entranced in Gifty’s story. Readers will find themselves invested in Gifty’s scientific pursuits as she tries to determine whether she believes more in the corporeal practicalities of the mind or the spiritual nature of religion.