Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer. 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.

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. I (a child who would leave for college without ever taking a sex-ed class) devoured this. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. The book turned out to be erotica about a Native American man who helps a white woman survive a snowstorm. 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. 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.

Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Homegoing is an expansive novel about the legacy of chattel slavery by African-born writer Yaa Gyasi spanning eight generations. Homegoings imaginative breadth lies in dreaming up a lineage, a continuous history of family, for those who would otherwise be dust. Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana.

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