Homegoing

Two half sisters, Effia & Esi, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman & will live in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising children who will be sent abroad to be educated before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the empire. 

Esi, imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle's women's dungeon & then shipped off on a boat bound for America, will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the wars of Ghana to slavery & the Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the American South to the Great Migration to twentieth-century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi's novel moves through histories & geographies. 

YAA GYASI was born in Ghana & raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University & an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.