I think I put off reading this book because I loved Homegoing so much, and it's hard not to compare an author's debut to their follow up.
Transcendent Kingdom follows a young neuroscientist whose depressed mother comes to stay with her. Her present day is comprised of taking care of her mom and tending to her lab mice at work, and then flashbacks give a sense of her life growing up and ultimately her brother's addiction and how it lead to his death.

This was a quiet novel, the audio was beautifully narrated by Bahni Turpin, and Gyasi's writing is just so seamlessly written and addicting. This is a beautiful contemporary, literary fiction read.

This is such a beautiful book and the writing is exceptional. I did find it at times a hard read though as it deals with some very tough subject matter including grief, mental illness and addiction. Definitely one worth sticking with though as it is wonderful.

This is a beautiful novel about the experiences of a family struggling with the impact of addiction, depression and grief. The protagonist (Gifty) turns to science to look for solutions to the problems that have ravaged her family, while also balancing her search for answers with the religious faith in which she was raised. A very moving novel.

Transcendent Kingdom by @yaagyasi is the story of Gifty, a neuroscience Ph.D student grappling with her faith in the wake of her brother's death and mother's mental illness.

Through no fault of the book, I started and stopped this one so many times over the past year - life interruptions, other books calling my name - and I sorely regret that decision because this book was AMAZING!

The writing in this book was beautiful in its simplicity. The shortest sentences or questions would lay me out on a visceral level. The rawness, honesty and innocence in Gifty's thoughts and questions as a child were heartbreaking as she tried to make sense of issues beyond her years like abandonment, drug addiction, mental illness, and the revelation that people are imperfect in their faith. I described it to one person as being simultaneously heart wrenching and beautiful...an exquisitely painful read.

Yaa Gyasi is a special writer and is absolutely an auto-buy author for me now. I'm so glad I've already got Homegoing on my shelf so I can continue my journey with this amazing author! Though this novel is short, it doesn't feel so, as it's filled with emotional depth. It taught me that those books that leave you wanting more probably don’t need more pages, they just need more of whatever magic Yaa Gyasi has.

Though a work of fiction, this one definitely reads like a memoir. I could relate to Gifty’s journey with trying to reconcile religion and science and how others can’t understand how you can hold both truths.

I would recommend this one to those who enjoy stories with an inside look into the dissolution of a family, stories with strong internal conflict, and even those nonfiction lovers out there who are looking for a good fiction read.

TW: drug/opioid addiction, racism, mental illness, abandonment, drug overdose, suicide attempt

Thank you to @netgalley for the digital ARC!

This book was just not for me I think I maybe got through 10% of it before the book expired through pocketbook

"I would always have something to prove, Nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it."

I can't think of better words to describe Transcendent Kingdom, but "blazing brilliance." It is a remarkable story that is dazzling written from the first page to the very last page. It's the kind of story that brings out the thoughts and feelings I love most about reading, and I have a lot of thoughts and feeling about stories.

Transcendent Kingdom is a raw, insightful, intimate look into the thoughts of neuroscientist grad student Gifty while she tries to make sense of addiction and depression that has gutted her family. It is a quiet, eloquent written story that explores a complex web of themes of family, grief, race, belonging, addiction, depression through Gifty's shame, weaving them together to a quiet redemption.

The themes are deeply layered with faith and science as Gifty struggles with faith, no longer giving her comfort and the answers she seeks. She turns to science to understand and make sense of her brother's addiction to opioids. She uses her thesis experiment to study reward-seeking behavior in mice and discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

"I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science," she writes. "Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately, both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning."

"Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?"

The story's strength is the dynamics between Gifty and her thoughts towards her mother and their dynamics. The tension between their dynamics drives the story forward. Gifty is a challenging character to relate to as she is distant, guarded, and restrained as she observes and makes sense of the world around her. Her structured thoughts and feelings are brilliantly insightful and thought-provoking but can come across as more matter-of-fact rather than emotional. However, under her guarded wall and the quiet layers to the story, she is a character screaming to be heard and one that is rewarding to listen to!!

"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."

Thanks to the publisher for an e-ARC of this one! There’s been a lot of love for Gyasi this past year but this was my first by her and I went in with limited knowledge of the book. This was a really beautiful and painful story in so many different ways. Gifty, the MC, is a PhD student studying addiction after her brother overdosed when she was younger. Narrated from her point of view, we constantly come to back to issues of addiction as she tries to study whether there are ways to help.

The book also tackles two other big areas of discussion: science vs religion and the experience of immigrants in the States. Gifty’s family had immigrated to the US from Ghana before she was born and their lives and the racism they face, some instances more insidious than others, is nothing like they expected. Gifty was also raised in a religious household, her priest playing a significant role in her family’s life throughout the book, but she struggles to make sense of the science and religion dichotomy, especially as her experience of Christianity has mostly taught her to be ashamed of herself.

I really enjoyed the author’s writing and these big issues that Gifty struggles with. It felt a little harder to get a sense of her character but there’s so much she’s still working through that we really needed the whole book to get a clear view of who she is as she starts to recognize the harms done to her in her childhood and beyond. I was reminded a lot of Sammie’s post on the trauma of being Black for Shattering Stigmas, as Gifty is so entrenched in this church and Christianity from a young age that she does feel the trauma of being Black before coming to terms with her identity as a Black woman.

I did find the ending rather abrupt and it felt so off from the rest of the story. It was too neat and wrapped up based on the previous chapter so I would’ve preferred to have taken the time to get there. There was also details about Gifty’s work that didn’t feel quite right. The author mentions in the acknowledgements that she based the research off of her friend’s so there’s likely some accuracy there but Gifty is in the final year of her PhD and still doing experiments, not having written a single word of her thesis. For the PhD students I’ve known, experiments would’ve been completely wrapped up and that last year would be entirely dedicated to writing so that struck me as odd. That aside, it’s a really wonderful book if you’re in the mood for some heavier topics.

Appreciate the work, but not to my taste generally and so do not feel comfortable talking in more detail.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi was one on my highly anticipated fall releases and I am so happy it lived up to the hype I built up in my own mind after reading Homegoing earlier this summer.

Trascendent Kingdom is the story of Gifty, a young neuroscientist doing research into the pleasure centres in the brain to help learn more about addiction and depression. Addiction when they are overly responsive and depression when they stop responding to anything. Gifty chose this research because of her own family, her brother’s opioid addiction and her mother’s chronic depression. Not only does this book delve into those issues and how they affected Gifty, but also highlights Gifty’s religious upbringing and how she was a part of the only Black family in town and in her church. Themes of science vs religion, otherness, connection to family and friends vs isolation, addiction and mental health and the stigma that can be isolating to those who suffer and their loved ones, and many more themes are all wrapped up in a beautiful story of a scientist looking for answers.

Highly recommend reading this novel. I think this would be the perfect book club novel as there is so much to discuss and debate within.

Transcendent Kingdom felt less like a novel and more like an exploration of ideas. As an exploration of ideas, it was solid. I enjoyed reading about Gifty's thoughts and musings on religion and science, especially when she connected them to her work in neuroscience. Instead of simply privileging one over the other, or discounting one in favour of the other, Gyasi devotes time to examining both as complex entities with a considerable impact on Gifty and her perspective.

As a narrative, though, Transcendent Kingdom really fell short for me. The story was too discombobulated, going back and forth between the past and the present in a way that was disorienting more than anything else. What little narrative this book had was made all the more fragmented and confusing by moving so quickly and frequently between those two timelines. The result was a novel that felt like it was about someone thinking about their life and philosophy, as opposed to an actual story about that person. The distinction is an important one, and what ultimately let this book down.

(Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada for providing me with an e-ARC of this in exchange for an honest review!)

Big thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the digital review copy!

This is the very definition of a five-star novel. I usually avoid religion in fiction because, as an agnostic, I'm not really interested in the subject matter. However, through Yaa Gyasi's excellent prose, I was fully invested in Gifty's internal struggle between science and the theology she grew up with. Her struggles with identity, spirituality, family, mental health, and losing a loved one to addiction are universal themes which any reader should be able to appreciate. Yaa Gyasi's writing is truly breathtaking and heart-wrenching, which makes this story even more powerful.

This is a new favourite, and I HIGHLY recommend it.

The perfect follow up to Homegoing. It's easy to say that anyone who enjoyed Yaa Gyasi's first book will also get a lot out of this one. I was ruined by the ending, and the journey for some characters left me absolutely broken. In particular Grity's relationship with her mother was incredibly nuanced and wrenching to read. Easily one of the best books of the year, but I expected nothing less after Homegoing, and it's clear that Gyasi knew that!

I found Transcendent Kingdom to be less accessible than Gyasi’s first novel Homegoing. It is also less grand in scope, focusing more on a fewer number of characters than her previous novel.

There is so much emotional depth and beautiful writing that was present in Homegoing, but overall I found this to be a less polished novel. Several of the parts delving into the scientific themes come off like they’re written by a high school student writing a paper, paraphrasing what they read on Wikipedia. The ending to the novel is also rather abrupt, and didn’t really feel like it brought much resolution.

Even though this novel didn’t draw me in as much as Gyasi’s first book did, I can’t help but look forward to reading what comes from her in the future.

I didn't love this book as much as I hoped I would. I found it confusing as the timeline jumped all over the place throughout the book. The writing contains a lot of emotional depth and you really feel for Gifty throughout the story. Topics include science, faith, addiction and mental illness.

Thank you to Penguin Randomhouse Canada and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

“What do you say to a woman’s back, your mother’s back? The curve of it, the sloping, sagging flesh of it, was more recognizable to me now than her face, which was once the only thing in the world that I sought out the most.”

I’ve been sitting on this review for about a week. I think this is one of those novels that stays with you for a long time. You can see from the quote above that Gyasi’s writing is striking, but it’s also subtle. It’s really only later, in quiet contemplation, that you realize you’ve read something profound.

Transcendent Kingdom tells the story of a Ghanian-American family. We experience, from Gifty’s point of view, her father’s disappearance back to Ghana, her golden-boy brother Nana’s descent into addiction, and her mother’s depression and suicide attempt. Gyasi handles these tough subjects with eloquence, beauty and sensitivity. At one point, Gifty says, “Though I had never been an addict, addiction, and the avoidance of it, had been running my life.” Ultimately, this is what the story is about: Gifty’s questioning, “Why?” Why did her brother become addicted? Why couldn’t he stop? This question tears at her head and her heart and tore at mine as well.

Also central to the story is Gifty’s exploration of her faith and all of the questions and doubts she has growing up Christian, seeing suffering, being confronted by non-believers, and working in science. I felt this was really well done and it was one of my favourite things about the book. I’m not sure this would appeal to everyone, but I saw a lot of my own experience reflected back to me and loved it because of that.

Transcendent Kingdom is very different from Homegoing, but I think it’ll also be well received. It will make you think. And it will make you feel.

This was an amazing book! It was a bit of a gut punch, but so poignant and thoughtful. A close and beautiful look at on family hardships and triumphs. A powerful exploration of faith. mental health and the bonds of family. Hard, yet hopeful. One of the best books of the year. I enjoyed reading the narrators memory and reckoning with her past. It was really good!

TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM by Yaa Gyasi is a really heavy novel and very thought provoking. This book revolves around Gifty, a neuroscience student at Stanford, and her Ghanaian family in Alabama and how her family deals with addiction, depression and struggles of faith. The writing is very poignant and I could really feel and understand the complexities to Gifty’s inner thoughts and emotions. It was really interesting to read about Gifty and her relationships since they were so complex. There’s such sadness in this book but I did enjoy reading it. There was a nice easy to follow flow in the timeline that featured flashbacks to Gifty’s childhood. I really felt like I got to know Gifty so well that at the end of the book I was happy to have read her story.

I’m really disappointed because I thought I would love this one based on the themes, but it just wasn’t for me. Maybe it wasn’t the right time for me, but after really liking the first several chapters, I found it hard to pay attention and had to push myself the rest of the way through. There were some parts where the stories told or ideas expressed piqued my interest, but as a whole I was disappointed that it didn’t speak to me more.

This book will be covered by Liberty on the Sept 1st All the Books podcast (so I was unable to cover it myself).

Gyasi was born in Ghana, but raised in Alabama. Her debut novel, 'Homegoing' won numerous awards and is a Heather's Pick. This new book tells the story of Gifty who is in her final year of neuroscience at Stanford. Through recollections we learn that Gifty's mom and dad came to the USA from Ghana with her older brother Nana, when he was young. Gifty was born in the USA, but shorty after her dad returned to Ghana and never came back. Gifty was raised in a religious home that never had much money. Her brother was a gifted athlete that became addicted to opioids and her mother also suffered from mental illness. Gifty's career is all about finding solutions to the pain. The book deals with science, religion, drug addiction and the immigrant experience. It is beautifully written and a good recommendation for customers looking for a slightly more literary book and are okay with something that moves a little slower, with more thought and analysis than action.