I too was raised evangelical and went on to study neuroscience and have asked many of the same questions Gifty wrestles with in this text, and yet, wow, if I could only be so brilliant to churn out such a book! I hope you get a chance to try it. The complexity of the issues and the multi-layering and playing with time. “His birth cast a long shadow,” Gifty says, and she “was born into the darkness that shadow left behind.” Gifty, pensive and quiet, adores her more outgoing brother, who manages through sports to sidestep the many rules imposed by his devout, hard-working mother.Transcendent Kingdom is a book that makes writers jealous. Athletic and charming, Nana was the answer to prayer for a couple who had tried years to conceive. Her mother, employed as a homecare worker, is left to support her small family, composed now of Gifty and Gifty’s older brother, Nana. Her father, whom she calls Chin Chin Man, returns to Ghana after an unsuccessful attempt to ease into American life.

Gifty, the central character, is the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants living in small town Alabama.

Gyasi’s debut, the award-winning, “Homegoing,” spanned eight generations and multiple characters, but this new book is firmly rooted in Alabama and later, northern California.

But it is also a sensitively rendered examination of mental illness and addiction, and the uneasy space these inhabit in an African immigrant family. Through deliberate and precise prose, the book becomes an expansive meditation on grief, religion, and family. What does a confused and grieving girl do with her questions to God when the very premise of her religious belief is blind, unwavering faith? What happens when she later turns to science to find answers for the wounds that have shaped her life? If the Bible plainly states that the soul exists, what is this young girl, now a neuroscientist, to do with the knowledge that her chosen field claims there is no scientific proof of the soul’s existence? That, in fact, what we call the soul is in reality the deeply complex terrain of the brain? Yaa Gyasi’s profoundly moving second novel, “Transcendent Kingdom,” takes place in this vast, fragile landscape where the mysteries of God and the certainties of science collide.

The transcendent kingdom