Transcendent Kingdom

1
 
Whenever I think of my mother, I picture a queen-sized bed with her lying in it, a practiced stillness filling the room. For months on end, she colonized that bed like a virus, the first time, when I was child and then again when I was a graduate student. The first time, I was sent to Ghana to wait her out. While there, I was walking through Kejetia market with my aunt when she grabbed my arm and pointed.  Look a crazy person, she said in Twi.  Do you see?  A crazy person.
 
I was mortified.  My aunt was speaking so loudly, and the man, tall with dust caked into his dreadlocks, was within earshot.  I see. I see, I answered in a low hiss.  The man continued past us, mumbling to himself as he waved his hands about in gestures that only he could understand. My aunt nodded, satisfied, and we kept walking past the hordes of people gathered in that agoraphobia-inducing market until we reached the stall where we would spend the rest of the morning attempting to sell knock-off handbags.  In my three months there, we sold only four bags.
 
Even now, I don t completely understand why my aunt singled the man out to me.  Maybe she thought there were no crazy people in America, that I had never seen one before. Or maybe she was thinking about my mother, about the real reason I was stuck in Ghana that summer, sweating in a stall with an aunt I hardly knew while my mother healed at home in Alabama.  I was eleven, and I could see that my mother wasn t sick, not in the ways that I was used to. I didn t understand what my mother needed healing from.  I didn t understand, but I did.  And my embarrassment at my aunt s loud gesture had as much to do with my understanding as it did with the man who had passed us by.  My aunt was saying, That. That is what crazy looks like. But instead what I heard was my mother s name.  What I saw was my mother s face, still as lake water, the pastor s hand resting

Yaa Gyasi

ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Transcendent Kingdom trades the blazing brilliance of Homegoing for another type of glory, more granular and difficult to name.
The New York Times Book Review
 
Laser-like. . . . A powerful, wholly unsentimental novel about family love, loss, belonging and belief that is more focused but just as daring as its predecessor, and to my mind even more successful. . . . [Transcendent Kingdom] is burningly dedicated to the question of meaning. . . . The pressure created gives her novel a hard, beautiful, diamantine luster.
The Wall Street Journal
 
Yaa Gyasi s profoundly moving second novel takes place in the vast, fragile landscape where the mysteries of God and the certainties of science collide. Through deliberate and precise prose, the book becomes an expansive meditation on grief, religion, and family.
The Boston Globe
 
A stealthily devastating novel of family, faith and identity that s as philosophical as it is personal.
USA Today
 
Will stay with you long after you ve finished it.
Real Simple
 
Achingly lovely. . . . With her sophomore novel, Gyasi is narrowing her scope. Transcendent Kingdom is the story of one specific girl in one specific family: it is interior, psychological, and deeply focused on sifting through the layers of Gifty s mind as she studies and prays and experiments to try to find her way to what lies at the core of human beings.
Vox
 
A luminous, heartbreaking and redemptive American story, Transcendent Kingdom is the mark of a brilliant writer who is just getting started.  
Seattle Times

Elegant. . . . Burrows into the philosophical, exploring with complexity what it might mean for us to live without firm answers to the mysteries that wound us. . . . The measured restraint of Gyasi s prose makes the story s challenging questions all the more