Some novelists unpack a single day in their 300 pages, while others unfurl a quarter of a millennium. Gyasi, ambitiously, does the latter, tracing the parallel lineages begun by two West African half-sisters—one that remains in Ghana and one that extends, via a slave ship, to America—from the 1750s to today. Her language is modest, but her imagination and her fury are immense, and the effect of the fourteen braided but distinct lives she invents is to make you think that there may be no better way to comprehend the devastating but always complexly human ways that the history of enslavement, migration, and colonialism have shaped, but not entirely determined, individual lives.
—Tom Nissley, Phinney Books, Seattle, WA
In this beautiful and compelling work of historical fiction, we follow two half-sisters in the 18th century from Ghana to America. Effia is from the slave-trading Fante nation and Esi from the warrior Asante nation of the British American colony. The story continues, told in alternating narrative through their descendants, exploring the question of “what does it mean to be black in America today?” An engaging story with engaging characters, beginning to end.
–Janis Segress, Queen Anne Book Company, Seattle, WA
Homegoing is a favorite not just among Seattle booksellers; it is an independent bookstore national bestseller. Find a copy at Phinney Books, Queen Anne Book Company, or your local independent bookstore.