Homegoing

About Yaa Gyasi

About Homegoing

Homegoing is Yaa Gyasi's extraordinary debut novel — winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel begins in 18th-century Ghana with two half-sisters who never meet: Effia, who marries an English slave trader and lives in the splendor of Cape Coast Castle, and Esi, who is captured and sold into slavery in America. Each subsequent chapter follows one descendant from each line, tracing 250 years of Black history across Africa and America — through tribal warfare, the Middle Passage, plantation slavery, the Civil War, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and modern-day America. A staggering achievement of historical imagination.