Their prickly mother-daughter dynamic is haunted by absence: first, of the patriarch who abandoned them to return to Ghana when Gifty was small, and then of Nana, her older brother, a high-school basketball star who died of a heroin overdose as a teenager. Now she’s again taken to her bed – or rather, her daughter’s bed, since her concerned evangelical pastor has managed to get her on a plane from her Huntsville, Alabama, home to Stanford, where Gifty is studying for a PhD in neuroscience. Seventeen years earlier, sunk by grief and depression, Gifty’s Ghanaian mother tried to kill herself.

When my mother goes, whether by choice or not, there will be only one,” observes Gifty, the narrator of Transcendent Kingdom. “There used to be four of us, then three, two. Rather than multiplying and fanning out across the world, however, this particular family is shrinking, its domain narrowing. Family is central in her second novel, too, which tells a piercing story of faith, science and the opioid crisis. You’ll find books about science and work, books about faith, books centering complicated mother-daughter relationships, books about addiction, and books about immigrant families.I n her award-winning 2016 debut, Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi used a multi-generational family saga to trace slavery’s complex legacy in America and west Africa. I’ve chosen novels that grapple with various elements of what Transcendent Kingdom grapples with. If you, too, are a major Yaa Gyasi fan and are looking for more books like Transcendent Kingdom to read while waiting for whatever she decides to publish next, these are a great place to start. I read it when it came out in 2020, and I still think about it often.

The protagonist, Gifty, is working on her PhD in neuroscience, grappling with her relationship to faith, grieving the death of her brother to a drug overdose, and trying to untangle her uneasy relationship with her mother. It is a richly layered novel full of seemingly endless stories, and it is also intensely focused and full of a breathless interiority. Yaa Gyasi tackles science, faith, work, addiction, grief, complicated family relationships, immigrant experiences, race, Black girlhood and womanhood, and more. Transcendent Kingdom is one of those rare books that is about so much, and yet fits together flawlessly.

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