Ten Evenings with Yaa Gyasi, Presented by Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures

Yaa Gyasi’s follow-up to her acclaimed, bestselling Homegoing is powerful, raw, and intimate. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a Ghanaian immigrant family ravaged by depression and addiction—a searing novel of faith, science, religion, and love.

Transcendent Kingdom introduces us to Gifty, a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford, studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Turning to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, Gifty finds herself hungering for her evangelical childhood faith, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her debut novel, Homegoing, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” honors for 2016, and the American Book Award. She lives in Brooklyn.