Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, published in 2016, takes on an almost impossible formal challenge and meets it with a confidence that seems improbable in a first book. Homegoing traces two branches of a Ghanaian family across seven generations-from the early eighteenth century to the present day-moving in alternating chapters between the descendants of two half-sisters: one who married a British colonizer, one who was sold into slavery. The novel is structured as a series of linked short stories, each chapter following a different character across two centuries of African and African American history.

The ambition of this structure is matched by its execution. Each chapter is a complete story with its own narrative economy, its own character, its own historical moment-and yet the cumulative effect is that of a novel rather than a story collection, because Gyasi constructs each new chapter from the emotional and moral inheritance of those that preceded it. The chains of consequence are legible without being schematic; history here is not backdrop but active force.

Gyasi’s prose is direct and clear, qualities that serve her subject well: the history she is narrating-the slave trade, slavery in the American South, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the crack epidemic-does not require ornament. What it requires is honesty and specificity, and she provides both. Her characters are fully human rather than representative, and their particular sufferings are more devastating for being particular.

Homegoing is not a comfortable novel. But it is a generous one: it insists, against everything it depicts, on the survival of something that can be called home.