Homegoing

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award
Winner of the John Leonard Award from the NBCC
A notable book by The New York Times
A notable book by The Washington Post
One of the best books of the year: NPR, Time, Oprah.com, Harper’s Bazaar, San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Esquire, Elle, Paste, Entertainment Weekly, the Skimm, PopSugar, Minneapolis Star Tribune, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, Financial Times

Ghana, eighteenth century: Two half-sisters are born in different villages, unaware of each other’s existence. One will marry an Englishman and live a life of comfort in the grand rooms of Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured during a raid on her village, imprisoned in the same castle, and sold into slavery.

Homegoing traces the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants over eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to the Jazz Age in Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates the painful legacy of slavery for both those who were taken and those who remained – showing how the memory of captivity has been inscribed into the soul of our nation.

About Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in New York City.