Transcendent Kingdom

Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi
Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. 261 pages. Fiction

By the time Gifty leaves Alabama for Harvard, she's resolved to build a new self from scratch by shedding the debilitating experiences of her young life: her father's abandonment and return to Ghana, her older brother's heroin overdose, her mother's suicidal depression, her faltering Christian faith. Years later, as a fifth year PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford's school of medicine, she's untethered again when her mother arrives at her apartment withdrawn and depressed. As she cares for her mother and studies the neural circuits of reward seeking behavior in mice, she tries to understand the forces which crippled her childhood and reconcile with the ghosts from her tragic past.

I loved this book's careful reflections on the intersections between faith, science, religion, and family. This book feels reminiscent of a bildungsroman and explores strong themes and heavy topics in-depth throughout the novel. If you like character-driven, literary novels centered around gritty thematic exploration, then this book is for you.

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Real Life

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KMC