÷ ÷ ÷ Jill Owens: How did Homegoing begin? A tremendous debut.' We are proud to feature Homegoing as Volume 59 of Indiespensable. Homegoing is an inspiration.' And Phil Klay, author of Redeployment, writes, ' Homegoing is a remarkable feat - a novel at once epic and intimate, capturing the moral weight of history as it bears down on individual struggles, hopes, and fears. I think I needed to remember what happens when you pair a gifted literary mind to an epic task. Ta-Nehisi Coates raves, 'Gyasi's characters are so fully realized, so elegantly carved - very often I found myself longing to hear more….I think I needed to read a book like this to remember what is possible. Each sister's story, and the stories of their descendants up through the present day, is told in rich, precise, poetic language. Esi becomes the wife of a slave trader Effia is abducted as a slave, bound for America. Homegoing is the story of Esi and Effia, two half-sisters unknown to each other in 18th-century Ghana. But her voice is remarkably confident and assured, spanning generations and centuries. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.Yaa Gyasi's novel, Homegoing, is a marvelous debut, particularly given the author's youth (Gyasi is 26 years old). The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana.

Written with tremendous sweep and power, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history, each life indeliably drawn, as the legacy of slavery is fully revealed in light of the present day. The unforgettable New York Times bestseller begins with the story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a British slaver.

Homegoing author