Gyasi's debut opens in eighteenth-century Ghana with two half-sisters who never know of each other: Effia, married to the British governor of Cape Coast Castle, who lives in its palatial upper rooms, and Esi, captured in a raid and held in that same castle's dungeon before being shipped to America. Fourteen chapters then alternate their descendants, one generation at a time across eight — Asante wars and missionaries on one side of the Atlantic; Mississippi plantations, convict leasing, and Harlem on the other — until the lines converge in Marjorie and Marcus, who meet as students in California. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction.
Author: Yaa Gyasi · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 2016