Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, published in 2016, follows one family across centuries and two continents, one chapter at a time, beginning with an Asante woman named Maame and the generations that come after her. It begins in the eighteenth century with Maame's two daughters, half-sisters who never meet. Effia is raised in her village by a woman named Baaba and is married to James Collins, the British governor of Cape Coast Castle, taking her into the governor's household. Esi is held prisoner in the dungeons of that same castle, waiting to be shipped across the Atlantic.

From there the novel moves forward one generation at a time, so that the chapters carry the story from the Gold Coast through the trade in enslaved people, to plantations and coal mines in the United States, to the jazz clubs of the twentieth century and towards the present. Each descendant is given a chapter of their own, and the reader sees how the two lines, unaware of each other, are shaped by the history that separated them on the coast of West Africa.

Homegoing was Gyasi's debut novel. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction and the John Leonard Award for Best First Book from the National Book Critics Circle, and the National Book Foundation named Gyasi one of its 5 Under 35 authors in 2016.