![]() This is the front edge of the story: Gifty’s mother’s depression and the question of whether she’ll rebound. Gifty, a dutiful daughter, tries to help her mother feel something again. As the story opens, the mother leaves her southern home and comes to live with her adult daughter Gifty in California once there, the mother lies in bed every day in a recurrence of crippling depression, which manifests as anhedonia, the feeling of nothing. The story, as taut and intimate as her debut multi-generational novel Homegoing was sprawling and expansive, focuses on one working-class, Ghanaian immigrant family living in Alabama: a mother abandoned by her husband, single-handedly raising her son and daughter. Given our current lives amidst a pandemic with an unknowable and unforeseeable outcome, that question of what sustains us makes Gyasi’s novel astute and timely. This is the question both philosophical and literal thrumming throughout Yaa Gyasi’s haunting new novel. How do you make meaning out of the life you find yourself living, with its random senselessness? Can religion help? Can science? Can both? ![]() Transcendent Kingdom By Yaa Gyasi Reviewed by Bridgett M. ![]()
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