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Cover art forTranscendent Kingdom

Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi

Genre
Fiction
Format
Hardcover
Started Reading
Apr 21, 2021
Finished Reading
Apr 26, 2021

The setup here feels almost too overt: grad-school student Gifty takes up research to understand the trauma and tragedy of her family. In practice, though, it’s a meditation on religious belief and how it both sustains and fails us—something I deeply relate to as someone raised in a deeply religious family.

Gyasi’s story flits back and forth between the past and present but rarely felt overly formal, structure-wise. It is a measure of her skill that even though you know some of the characters’ fates beforehand, you still hope that the telling will prove those false somehow.