An alternate cover edition can be found here. A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation. Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.
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Listened to the audio version for book club.
0This is one of the most unique books I’ve read, especially in regards to the narrative style. Gyasi manages to craft extremely developed and complex characters, despite them only having a chapter to highlight their story.
I typically don’t gravitate towards historical fiction, so it took me a bit to get into this book, but once I did, wow. It’s so intricately crafted with how all the characters and the two lines of descendants tie together. Even the subtle callbacks to previous ancestors/relatives are so carefully constructed. For this reason, I did have to look back to understand the nuances of how some details related back in the line of descendants, but that was more my struggle lol.
Gyasi has such a beautiful writing style, and this is a precise, stunning novel that I highly recommend to anyone and everyone!!
0I just finished reading this 30 seconds ago and I wanted to get my immediate feelings down before they escape me. 1. Yaw, Esther, and Marjorie made me feel so fragiley happy; the love between them and the grandmother made me cry, even though it was only for a chapter or two. 2. This book has many characters and you try very hard to remember them because their lives are all important, full, and painful. You start with two sisters who you don't know are sisters, and the book takes you through their respective lives until they each basically have a kid, and then the next chapter moves onto the life of their kid. It does this for 7 generations until it gets to the modern america we live in. The book hardly gives you time to get to know each life before it moves onto the next. You see characters experience triumph and resistance and then unfair oppression and injustice and it's hard to watch, but you're supposed to read hard things so keep on going. By doing this, it makes you grasp a long, painful, also loving history through pre-slave trade, slave trade, slavery in america, post civil war, civil rights movement, post that, etc. etc.
Lol I should probably wait a few days before I write my Goodread reviews so they don't come out so jumbled, but I want people to read this book!
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