Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love. 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. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on Ox圜ontin.

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. There is so much to unravel and I know the conversations will be lively. I selected this novel as one of my best book club picks for September 2020 and I highly recommend that your book club reads this one in the future. So you do need to be in the right mindset when you start it. There’s also a bit of a melancholy feel to this one too. The writing is excellent-very literary fiction so it’s quite the in-depth character study. And Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi is one of those stories. But there’s something special about the novels that stick with you. With all the books out there, it’s easy to run through them and not think twice after you finish the last page (until your book club meeting, of course!). There are some novels that you know will have it-the emotion, the complexity and the longevity.

Review transcendent kingdom