Gifty herself refers to a college course involving books “of generational trauma among diasporic communities” and I realized that in just the past few weeks I have reviewed volumes of short stories about Cameroonian Americans and Zimbabwean Americans, so there is definitely such a genre. Her father, called here the “Chin Chin Man,” abandoned them and returned home, leaving his family to face financial hardship and racism in America without him. Gifty herself is altered, through loss and shame, forever.

The pain of this inexplicable tragedy drives Gifty’s mother into a depression so dark, so complete, that she cannot get out of bed for days at a time and may herself die of grief. The addiction absolutely controlled his life and then killed him. We are told of his descent, his attempts at recovery, his treatments, his relapses. After a perfectly ordinary ankle injury playing basketball in high school, her brother became addicted to prescribed Oxycontin, then heroin, then overdosed. Her experiment involves first getting mice addicted, so they will endure any pain to keep getting their reward-in this case the healthy drink Ensure-and then finding a way to stop the addicted mouse from seeking his pleasure. The narrator, Gifty, raised in Huntsville, is a genius, a Harvard graduate and now a PhD candidate at Stanford University, doing very sophisticated neuroscience work in her laboratory. Shorter in chronological scope, it is intense and unapologetically challenging. This second novel is also a great success, a bestseller and critically acclaimed. That epic story of eight generations of a family of Ghanaian-Americans won prizes and put Gyasi on everyone’s list of writers to watch.

Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel “Homegoing,” in 2016, was a sensation.

Transcendent kingdom by yaa gyasi