After reading Homegoing last year and it being one of my favorites of the year, I was more than excited for her new book. There’s no denying that Gyasi is an incredibly talented writer. Transcendent Kingdom felt like a memoir, such much in fact, that I spent some time researching it to see if there were any correlations to her own life in the story (alas, I found none). I enjoyed the layers of relationships between the main character, her mother and brother, and the hurt she felt and the challenges of being different (immigrant and race) along with being abandoned by their father, was complex and beautiful. The one thing I didn’t like that went through the entire novel was how areas of it were really dragged out with impeccable, but unnecessary detail. There were so many times the main character described her view on her religion, her mom’s views, and painfull descriptions of her experiences sitting in church time and again.

This was a heartbreaking book but also beautiful. Yaa Gyasi is an amazing author. I truly felt for the main character's brother and also the daughter/mother relationship. The book is written in beautiful language. I couldn't put it down.

Yaa Gyasi has written another book that you will be unable to put down until you reach the final word. It is a novel about Depression, Addiction and LOVE. Gifty loses her only brother to a heroin overdose, and she and her mother must find a way to go on without him. Gifty goes on to college and then to get her Phd in understanding addiction and why or how someone can break free and someone else is unable to realize that staying away is truly for the better. Yaa Gyasi's writing draws you in so much that you want to help everyone in the novel. Now we need to go out and look around us for those who need our help in life.

Let's just get this out of the way: five stars. Thank you @aaknopf for this ARC!

Synopsis: TK is about a Ghanaian family immigrating to America for a better life only to be ravaged by depression and addiction. It follows Gifty, a neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford, studying reward-seeking behavior in an effort to short circuit the causes of depression and addiction. "[C]ould this science work on the people who need it the most? Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?" It explores the relationship between mothers and daughters, science and religion, and shame and love.

Review: Transcendent means, among other things, to surpass or go beyond that which is a normal, physical human experience. To commune with God is an act of transcendence. Gyasi exquisitely blends Gifty's exploration of science with her childhood faith. She goes back and forth in time but you never feel it, but then she delves into familial relationships and you feel it all. Particularly great, is Gyasi's treatment of Gifty and her mother. "If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound."

Y'all, this book is good, stay up till 3 a.m. to finish reading it good. It's short (under 300 pages :: chef's kiss::), and I'm a slow reader but you get my point. Absolutely devoured this one. I've preordered it because I need a physical copy as well.

CW: mental illness, depression, racism, opioid addiction, animals used in science experiments

Pub Date: September 1, 2020.

Have your tissues ready and your heart open when you get your hands on this book: Yaa Gyasi's "Transcendent Kingdom" is a both heartwarming and heart-rending story about the journeys of painful growth that grief forces us into taking. Gifty, a young Ghanaian American woman, has her life turned upside down as a girl when her brother Nana dies of a drug overdose. His opiate addiction and his death challenge her faith in both God and her mother, forever changing her life, her family, and her approach to relationships with other people. In "Transcendent Kingdom," Yaa Gyasi presents a truly relatable and affecting look at how loss, once we experience it, colors the rest of our lives. Our career choices, our studies, our friendships and romantic relationships, the walls we put up for protection, our ability to believe in a higher power or science or other people, our ability to heal; all are affected by the losses we experience. "Transcendent Kingdom" will have you feeling both the pain of your own losses, and the relief and wisdom that comes with healing. (And you'll probably sniffle a lot, too.)

Gyasi writes beautiful books. Transcendent Kingdom delves into the story of Gifty, child of Ghanian immigrants growing up in Alabama and later pursuing a career in science, who is coming to terms with her relationship to God and her religion, her brother's death, and her relationship with her mother. It is not a lighthearted book. It took me several weeks to read because it was just so heartbreaking. But it is an important book, with masterful storytelling. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy.

Full disclosure: I'm only about halfway through the book, but from the first chapter alone, I knew I would love it. The writing is beautiful yet familiar, and like an old friend, it pulled me in right away. The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, Gifty is a young woman working toward an advanced degree in science. In the lab she studies addiction, a disease which took her older brother's life. At home she now takes care of her mother, who is battling depression. The presence of her deeply religious mother causes her to reflect back on her own relationship with God and the church, as well as her brother, her family, and perceptions of mental illness. I would normally feel weird giving 5 stars to a book I haven't finished, but I can't rave enough about this book.

So much beauty and pain and grief. This is a beautiful work on family, addiction, belonging, and work. I will not forget Gifty for a very long time.

Ever since I read Homecoming by Yaa Gyasi, every few months without fail I would google her name to see when she would be releasing a follow up. The wait was worth it.
Beautiful and lyrical, Transcendent Kingdom is a story of family, of home, faith, mental health, addiction, and the struggles of immigrants.
Well done!

Transcendent Kingdom is a stunning follow up to Gyasi's award-winning debut, "Homegoing". Her range is on full display with her second novel--where Homegoing was expansive, following multiple generations over centuries, Transcendent Kingdom stays close to its protagonist Gifty's internal life and struggles with her family, her faith, her growth and eventual self-acceptance. She deftly weaves Gifty's early life experience, wounded by an absent father, an addicted brother, her relationship with God, and a depressed mother, with her education, her research in neuroscience and her adult relationships.

Yaa Gyasi’s writing rips at your soul. She captures the impact of faith, especially as experienced in the South by a young immigrant family, can have on their life. It can carry you or it can abandon you. The twining of faith, drug addiction and loss throughout the book keep you reading and looking for some hope for characters.

Pretty sure I read Homegoing as an ARC, too, though it was on paper, not via NetGalley. The reviews and blurbs I’ve seen mention how different this second novel is. To me, it’s as if the very last chapter of Homegoing - the one set in the present - were the first chapter of the new book: more narrowly focused, completely contemporary, and set almost entirely in the U.S. I have to say, though, that I have mixed feelings about this one. The exploration of addiction and depression in all their complexity was moving, and, to my knowledge, honest. But Gifty seemed to proclaim new insights all too often, sometimes more than once in a single chapter. She drew connections and conclusions as if writing a college admissions essay. While this may have been true to her character (assiduous, accommodating, wise), it made for a didactic tone. I wonder if presenting the narrative as a journal - or at least with excerpts from her present journal rather than just the childhood one - would have helped. In any case, her reflections on religion and science were interesting enough, and I loved the attention paid to the impact of shame on friendship. Absolutely worth reading, especially if you like self-examination in your first-person narrators.

Immigration, mental health, drug addiction, and the pull of science vs. faith are all a part of this HUGE, spectacular story. This book may gut you but it is ultimately a survival story that should be added to everyone's TBR list. I wouldn't be surprised to see this on many award lists this year.

wow, this is a thoughtful read. Also unexpected, and lovely, steeped in grief for family members, but not without hope.

Transcendent Kingdom was a great exploration of the tension between science and religion as well as a compelling story of an immigrant family and the ways a family is influenced by opiate addiction. I also really enjoyed the description of what it's like to be a lab scientist.

I don’t have the words to do this story justice. It is one I highly recommend you read. I can tell you how it made me feel.
It is a story about a family that migrates from Ghana to Alabama. As a daughter, a sister and a mother this story resonated deeply with me. An eleven year old girl going through the pain of her brothers drug addiction and ultimately his death. A young daughter losing her mother to depression and trying so hard to be the savior. A mother’s worst nightmare, not being able to save her son or herself. These words were so powerfully written that I felt them heart and soul. Hard to believe that it is not a true story although it is all to real for too many.
As the girl, Gifty, becomes a women she has to rebuild herself to survive. She is a scientist that is still searching for her place spiritually and emotionally. Definitely a top read of this year for me and one I won’t soon forget.

In Transcendent Kingdom, we are in the head of the main character, who is a graduate student of neurobiology, as she wrestles with the death of her brother by overdose, her mother’s depression, abandonment by her father, and the science she is dedicating her life to. Interwoven through all of this is her upbringing in an evangelical church, and her attempts to discern between what she has been taught about God, seeing God, or the lack thereof through others actions, and her own questions that are raised about God as she goes through her lab experiments.

Many will identify with her struggles. You feel for her brother and how tragically human it is to die as he did; you can identify with her loss. You want the mother to become healthy again, for both of them. And then, too abruptly, the story ends. It really seemed like author didn’t know how to end this story. Maybe that was the point, as apparently she still hadn’t made sense of the place God has in her life.

I did not love this book the way I had hoped to, based on my experience of reading the author’s debut novel, Homegoing. Gifty is studying neuroscience at Stanford, hoping to find some answers to her questions about addiction and depression. Her brother, Nana, died of an overdose after becoming addicted to Oxycontin following a sports injury, and Gifty’s mother has taken to her bed in a deep depression, so she has some personal connection to her studies. This is a book about faith, and family, addiction, depression, and the ways our bodies and our minds hold onto beliefs and behaviors despite our best efforts to move beyond what our early experiences have taught us. There are layers to Gifty’s story, and they unravel themselves slowly. The writing is nuanced, but there are long passages about philosophy and religion which feel more like a lecture than part of the story. The characters were not developed fully enough, and the stray was lacking emotional depth. A good follow-up, not a great one, but I will look for Yaa Gyasi’s next novel for sure.

While Homegoing is certainly a high bar to meet, I believe that the author has accomplished this, albeit on a different scale. Homegoing felt ethereal and expansive, while Transcendent Kingdom is beautiful and feels closer to our daily lives. It is a very moving story about problems that impact many of us at some point in our lives - drug addiction, depression, and being raised in a single-parent household struggling to make ends meet. It is moving without feeling heavy and without feeling like a lecture is being delivered. I found it to be incredibly raw and impactful while still being hopeful!

Transcendent Kingdom is a perfect work of fiction. Gifty's world is fueled by the need to understand her brother's addiction and mother's depression. As a student of neuroscience she is experimenting on mice to find and neutralize the trigger for addiction. Every word Gyasi uses has power; not a single one out of place. Gyasi is a force of a writer.