Preview
  • Transcendent Kingdom

  • A novel
  • By: Yaa Gyasi
  • Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
  • Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (2,566 ratings)

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Transcendent Kingdom

By: Yaa Gyasi
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
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Publisher's summary

New York Times Best Seller • A Today Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick! • Finalist for the Women's Prize

Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

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.

Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief - a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.

©2020 Yaa Gyasi (P)2020 Random House Audio
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Critic reviews

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK!
FINALIST FOR WOMEN'S FICTION PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Harper’s Bazaar ● NPR ● Good Housekeeping ● Glamour ● Book Riot ● Library JournalWashington Post ● Amazon ● Marie Claire ● Kirkus Reviews ● Vanity FairEntertainment WeeklyTown and Country ● Indigo ● BBC ● USA Today ● Parade ● Real Simple ● Apartment Therapy ● Refinery29

"Gyasi sometimes reminds me of other writers who’ve addressed the immigrant experience in America—Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li in particular.... As in the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or the Ghanaian-American short-story writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, the African immigrants in this novel exist at a certain remove from American racism, victims but also outsiders, marveling at the peculiar blindnesses of the locals...brilliant... Transcendent Kingdom trades the blazing brilliance of Homegoing for another type of glory, more granular and difficult to name." —Nell Freudenberger, The New York Times Book Review

Featured Article: Must-Hear Contemporary Black Women Authors


It’s a fact that a high percentage of the best books that have come out in this century have been written by Black women authors. (Truth be told, there are so many excellent works that this list could simply centered on the best contemporary authors and still be accurate.) Nevertheless, Black women’s stories deserve to be heard, and when the stories are this compelling, this engaging, and this beautifully written, they’re impossible to ignore.