More than most books we’ve read at The Bookly Club, fellow book-lovers can’t seem to say enough good things about this year’s November book. And rightfully so! This bestseller is an all-time favorite for a lot of readers and has won countless accolades.
Selected in 2016 for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book, one of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017, recipient of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for 2017, an American Book Award, and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature
The historical fiction debut novel Homegoing begins in eighteenth century Ghana, and follows the parallel lives of two half sisters and their descendants. One sister, Effia, marries an Englishman and lives a life of comfort. The other, Esi, is captured, imprisoned, and sold into slavery. This multigenerational family saga travels from Southern plantations and the Civil War, to the Great Migration, the jazz age, dope houses in twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day.
“Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.”
And if you can believe it, this unique and poignant story was published when Yaa Gyasi was just 26 years old. Born in Ghana and raised in Alabama from the age of 10, Gyasi studied at Stanford University where she received a BA in English and then an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But her debut, Homegoing, was inspired by a 2009 trip to Ghana which she hadn’t visited since leaving the country as an infant. She completed the novel in 2015, and after initial readings of her manuscript she was signed-on by Knopf with a seven-figure advance!
But for all these accolades and dollar signs, it’s the love that readers have for this story that really excites us. We’re so glad to finally be reading this beauty, and we hope you’ll read it with us!
Here’s how…
- Pick up a copy from where ever you get your books, and read along with us anytime between now and the end of November
- Keep us posted on social using #booklymark and tagging @thebooklyclub
- Stay tuned for our discussion post on Instagram and/or our reviews here on the blog to share our thoughts!
Happy reading x
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