I have been aware of, and heard nothing but great things about, Transcendent Kingdom since its release a few years ago, and I am glad I finally got around to reading it. I didn't know much about the story going into it, but the family-led dynamic really appealed to me, in its depiction of inter-generational bonds and the strain of relationships between immigrant parents and native-born children in the Western world. This was very much a tale of a mother and daughter, with the ghost of their brother and son watching over them as attempts are made to rekindle their relationship in order to save one another from their woes. My heart broke for Gifty as she struggled with looking after her mother and herself too, and felt massive amounts of empathy for her mother and what she had been through. I wasn't as interested in the other aspects of Gifty's life - I felt it either should have become a bigger part of the story or not really needed at all.

Not my fave Yaa Gyasi book but I do find her writing style compelling. The pacing for me was a little off in this one and it could have done with more dialogue to form a better pace.

Review: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Rating: 4 Stars
After loving and recommending Homegoing to everyone, when I saw this one was coming out I was incredibly excited to read it.
First of all this cover is absolutely stunning. Transcendent Kingdom is a very intimate and layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama. The writing was brilliant as expected, but I didn’t love this one as much as her debut.
Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.
This book covers A LOT. It explores topics such as addiction, depression, religion, family dynamics, grief, faith, science and love in under 300 pages and can be quite a lot at times. It is incredibly emotional and powerful and I think that is why it took me a while to read, but it’s also why I would recommend this one. (and yes I did cry)
You cannot fault Gyasi’s writing, and the mixture between present and past tenses really allows you as a reader to explore the depth of the characters. It was a stunning follow up to Homegoing but for me that book is really hard to top! There are so many good quotes too but here’s a favorite of mine:
“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”
Please do check the content warnings before reading, as I may have missed a few in my review above.

I loved homegoing and went into this one with similar expectations - it did not disappoint. Different enough from that one to feel new but the same lyrical writing, story telling, and characterisation. So perfectly depicts the weird grief for a loved one who is gone but not gone, and the ways we are haunted

A little different to books I’d normally read! Transcendent Kingdom is a thoughtful read, it is descriptive and overall I enjoyed it. I struggled slightly with the structure of the book but as it is different to my usual genre I put it down to this.

I sadly dnf’ed this book I really enjoyed the authors previous but could just not engage with this one . Just not for me

Gyasi did it again! Such a different feel to Homegoing, but it was such a mesmerizing experience. Dealing with hard topics in such a delicate way

I absolutely loved Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. The novel tells the story of Gifty, a young Ghanaian woman living in the United States who is struggling to come to terms with the death of her brother who died of a drug overdose.

Gifty is also trying to deal with her immigration status and her feelings of alienation from both her Ghanaian homeland and her American home. The novel is beautifully written and Yaa Gyasi does an amazing job of creating fully realized characters who feel like real people.

I was particularly impressed by the way she portrayed Gifty's mental health struggles in a sensitive and realistic manner.

The novel also deals with some difficult topics, such as race, grief, immigration and hope, but Yaa Gyasi handles these issues with grace and compassion. I felt like I was right there with Gifty, feeling everything she was feeling.

The writing is absolutely beautiful and the story is incredibly compelling. I could not put this book down!

A beautifully written book which deals with some hard hitting topics including ethnicity and mental health, but does so in a sensitive way. A powerful and emotional read that I would recommend

Beautiful but traumatic book. I've read nothing like this before, it mixes religion and science wonderfully and deals with topics such as ethnicity and identity

I really enjoyed Gyasi's Homegoing and it's one of the books I most frequently recommend to others so I was excited to read this. As with Homegoing, Gyasi's talent as a writer shines through the narrative.

I found this quite a harrowing read, with issues such as addiction, intergenerational trauma and the immigrant experience explored unflinchingly. There was a thread of deep sadness running through Gifty's story and at times I found it desperately tragic. These issues are written about sensitively but it's worth being aware of if you're feeling low.

I struggled to connect with Gifty sometimes as a character, it may just have been her characterisation as a scientist which made me zone out a bit whenever there was a focus on her work, I found the other characters more compelling overall.

A beautifully written book that covers a lot of different issues, including; mental health, immigration and the immigrant experience in the USA, racism, addiction, family and familial relationships, and so many more.

I thought that it was very sensitively done, featured accurate portrayals of the issues (those which I have experience of certainly felt accurate for me) and really made me think.

I loved the main character, Gifty, but I failed to connect with some of the other characters on a deeper level. It is also a heavily character driven book, and not plot driven which, combined with the non linear timescale, made it feel a little disjointed for me.

I have been told Homegoing is even better so I will definitely be going back to read that.

Transcendent Kingdom is a story that is shaped by themes of grief, addiction, family, and identity. Interweaved in this is religion and science. Gifty lives and breathes science as part of her work and I found how Gyasi combined those two quite differing topics together to create one really harmonious story.

The story in itself broke my heart in many ways but mostly when Gifty looks back on her relationship with her brother Nana, and his passing from an overdose. It's not a graphic read by any stretch of the imagination, but those feelings are encapsulated so well that you feel a part of it.

While Transcendent Kingdom didn't blow my away I did really, really enjoy it. I loved how the story effortlessly flitted back and forth through time, and I enjoyed the short journal passages addressed to God, which really brought it altogether.

I also loved reading about Gifty's Ghanaian background and how real it all felt. A truly thoughtful but gorgeous and intense book.

I've not read Homegoing yet but I'd certainly love to after this.

A keen exploration of the relationship between faith and science told beautifully and well-paced. You could easily lose an entire day in the pages of this book and you won't regret it.

What an astoundingly brilliant book. As a huge fan of Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, I was frightened she might not be able to pull it off again. But her sophomore novel was even better! Deservedly shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, this is a tour de force that once again combines family history, social history, myth and romance in a distinctly unique way that only Yaa Gyasi can. I loved it, thank you for letting me read it.

This book was so moving, a negotiation between the ghosts of our pasts and our histories, of motherhood and identity. This was my first Yaa Gyasj (I still need to pick up Homegoing!) but I was drawn in by her voice and could not put this down! Just left me in a lull of smooth prose.

I loved this book so much that I now have my own copy! It is an unflinching, raw look at the spiderwebs that form in the families of people who deal with substance abuse, showing the lengths that people will go to be able to process and understand something that is often not understandable. Juxtaposing the pursuit of science and religion, it reveals where we seek understanding in our lowest ebbs, as well as how these both coexist and clash in the modern world. It is a marvellous new edition to Yaa Gyasi's bibliography and I remain furious that it did not sweep up come award season.

I flew through this, and therein lies my not complete love of the book....

I read the majority of it in one sitting. I really liked the science/faith balance and discussion.
I loved the writing style and voice of the story - I quite often forgot I was reading a novel I was so convinced it was a memoir. However nothing MORE or EXTRA gets said after a while....and that's when I started to lose interest. I was still interested but found myself getting more easily distracted, and not rereading parts when I lost track of where I was.

Overall I really enjoyed this, and can't wait to read Homecoming - which sounds more like my sort of book - and whatever comes next from Gyasi.

A stunning book, very different in content and theme from Homecoming but equally powerful - dealing with addiction, depression and family breakdown in beautifully written prose, I loved it.

A deeply sad and moving account of one woman trying to navigate her grief and trying to make meaning, whether through science or religion.

Gifty is a neuroscience researcher at Stanford School of Medicine, studying patterns of addiction and reward-seeking behavior in mice. As the novel unfolds we discover that Gifty's studies have been triggered by the trauma of her brother's death. Nana was a gifted high-school athlete whose life turned upside down after an injury left him hooked on Oxycontin and desperately seeking another high, until he overdosed on heroin. As well as dealiing with her own grief over her brother's death, Gifty must also care for her suicidal mother who has flown from Alabama to take up residence in Gifty's bed.

The novel is incredibly poignant as Gifty looks to science, and the religion of her childhood, to make meaning of her family's suffering. As a scientist, and narrator, Gifty remains detatched, which creates an inherent tension in her attempt to process the traumas directly affecting her life. She meditates on both science and religion, not as antithetical beliefs, but as two different ways of making meaning and understanding the world. But neither quite suffice, and ultimately, it is only really through the act of writing her story down that she can finally navigate her grief and pay justice to her brother, perhaps achieving a kind of transcendence.

As if that wasn't enough for such a slim and concisely written book, we also see Gifty navigate her identity, wanting to be seen as a scientist, not a 'black woman scientist.' Racial identity is an undercurrent throughout the novel, as an immigrant Ghanaian family in the deep south of Alabama and Gifty notes the impact of racism on her father, who abandons the family to return to Ghana when Gifty is still a young child. As Gifty tries to balance and understand the aspects of her identity and family trauma, she also tries to live her life as any woman in her twenties - dating, finding friends and connecting with others.

Transcendent Kingdom is a very different novel to Homegoing, but is no less touching or beautifully written. Where the first novel is expansive, verging on epic, Transcendent Kingdom deals with the very minute. It is slower-paced and more meditative, it could almost feel claustrophobic, with time ricocheting around Gifty's childhood memories to the present day. Yaa Gyasi has a knack for building heart-wrenching stories which lay bare significant social traumas on a very personal level. Yet, while her novels are raw in their depiction of suffering they are ultimately hopeful too. Transcendent Kingdom is a quiter, more unassuming novel, but it promises to haunt you, transcending its own pages.