Transcendent Kingdom
Yaa Gyasi's second novel is a quiet, searching book about faith, science, addiction, and the long aftermath of grief. Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate at Stanford, running optogenetic experiments on the neural circuitry of reward and restraint, trying to understand at the cellular level what destroyed her older brother Nana. Once a star high-school athlete in their Alabama town, Nana became addicted to OxyContin after a sports injury and died of a heroin overdose. Their mother, a Ghanaian immigrant who came to America seeking a better life for her children, has not recovered. When she arrives at Gifty's apartment unable to get out of bed, Gifty must hold together her research, her loneliness, and her tangled inheritance of Pentecostal faith. Gyasi writes with restraint and precision, refusing easy reconciliation between the laboratory and the church.
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What you might want to know about Transcendent Kingdom
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Gifty is a sixth-year Stanford neuroscience PhD student running optogenetic experiments on reward-seeking mice in a Palo Alto lab.
Both novels are by Yaa Gyasi and share her concerns with race, family, and faith. Homegoing (2016) is a sweeping historical novel; Transcendent Kingdom (2020) is more interior and contemporary. Each is a standalone.
Transcendent Kingdom was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Women's Prize for Fiction. It was a New York Times bestseller and one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020.
Transcendent Kingdom was written by Yaa Gyasi, published in 2020 by Bond Street Books.
Transcendent Kingdom is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Transcendent Kingdom takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Transcendent Kingdom is a standalone novel by Yaa Gyasi, not part of a series.
Transcendent Kingdom is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.