Transcendent Kingdom: A Read with Jenna Pick: A novel
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed novel Homegoing is "a book of blazing brilliance" (The Washington Post)—a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.
A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK! • Finalist for the WOMEN'S PRIZE
Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed.
Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.
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What Bookclubbers are saying about this book
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Readers say *Transcendent Kingdom* by Yaa Gyasi thoughtfully explores faith, science, family, addiction, and racial prejudice through Gifty’s complex ...
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
264 pages
What’s it about?
Gifty is sixth-year PhD candidate at Stanford University School of Medicine studying neuroscience. Her interest is in reward seeking behavior and addiction. Alternating between the past and the present this is a story of a family grappling with the many facets of mental health.
What did it make me think about?
I loved Gifty! What a great character. She was so complicated, and yet so refreshing. "He smiled at me, and I wanted to slap the smile off his face, but I wanted other things more."
Should I read it?
I highly recommend this book. It is a family story first- but it also sheds light on addiction, depression, religion, and being an immigrant in the Deep South. What a combination...
Quote-
"But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world thought a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning."
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