Article contributed by Laura Glassman
Transcendent Kingdom is a multilayered story of a Gifty, a scientist who seeks answers for her questions about her brother’s addiction and whether questions of science and religion can or cannot be reconciled. It a deep and richly written story.
Readers of Yaa Gyasi’s earlier work, Homegoing, may be surprised. While Transcendent Kingdom is equally as wonderful as Homegoing, it is a very different kind of book. While Homegoing told the stories of generations of people, Transcendent Kingdom tells the more focused or perhaps intimate story of a woman and her family. Yaa Gyasi does this well, proving that she is a multifaceted writer.
Gifty, a young woman originally from Ghana, works as a scientist who researches neuroscience through her lab work with mice. We slowly learn that Gifty is somewhat obsessed with this work for very personal reasons. Her brother, Nana, was addicted to pain relieving drugs her entire family suffered as a result. Gifty is haunted by what happened to Nana and cannot stop thinking about why it happened or how it might have been prevented. Thus, she attempts to understand addiction in mice through her work.
Meanwhile, we learn that Gifty’s mother, who has come to live with her, is highly depressed, likely as a result of what happened to Nana and being left by her husband. Gifty must reconcile her feelings towards her mother, who clearly favoured Nana.
Transcendent Kingdom is a fascinating book because it delves into deep questions of life and meaning. It is fascinating to read about Gifty’s research and how it results from her feelings of grief and confusion with regard to her beloved brother. She raises questions of how and why addiction happens and whether it can be prevented, all the while telling a deeply personal and affecting story.
One of the more significant themes of Transcendent Kingdom is that of science and religion and science and how or whether they can be reconciled. Gifty was brought up within a church community. However, initially, she has many negative feelings towards the church she was brought up in and religion as a whole. Her home church became very unsupportive and judgmental towards Nana and her entire family in response to his addiction. She blames them in part for what happened to him as a result of their lack of support and nurturance. As she goes through her journey as a young adult, she must reconcile her staunch believe in science and rationality with the feelings of connection that she has to religion. She begins to realise some of the valuable aspects of religion and faith and what they might positively bring to her life, however, she must determine how faith and science can be reconciled in her life.
Transcendent Kingdom is a beautifully written and highly substantive book that will make readers both think and feel. It is not an action-packed book. However, what it does, it does well. Yaa Gyasi writes a thought provoking, cerebral and deep feeling book on some fascinating and important topics.
Transcendent Kingdom is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
Will you be picking up Transcendent Kingdom? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
Yaa Gyasi’s stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.
Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.
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. 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. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut.
