Transcendent Kingdom

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford, studying the neural circuitry of reward-seeking and addiction in mice. Her clinical, meticulous research is not abstract: her brilliant older brother, Nana, died of a heroin overdose after a sports injury led to opioid dependency, and her mother now lies in Gifty's bed sunk in a depression so profound she can barely move.

Raised in Alabama by Ghanaian immigrant parents in an evangelical church, Gifty has spent her life caught between the certainties of faith she absorbed as a child and the empirical rigor she now lives by. As she cares for her mother and pursues her experiments, the novel moves fluidly between past and present — her family's arrival in America, her father's departure, Nana's decline, her own loss of faith — searching for a way to reconcile science and spirit, suffering and meaning.

Yaa Gyasi's second novel is a quiet, piercing study of grief, addiction, immigration, and belief. Interior and unshowy, Transcendent Kingdom trades the sweep of her debut for depth, offering an intimate portrait of one mind trying to understand why we suffer and whether anything can save us.