But “it also makes me nervous that people are going to have kind of harsher expectations for my work than they might have otherwise.”Īs she started drafting Homegoing in earnest, Gyasi was drawn to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. “It’s great that it brings the work attention,” she says, and she thinks it’s good for other African immigrants to see that it’s possible to have a lucrative career in the arts. Having that paycheck publicized feels like “a double-edged sword” Gyasi says. With its acquisition by Knopf, Gyasi joined the ranks of recent novelists, from Garth Risk Hallberg to Emma Cline (her novel The Girls also comes out in June) who reportedly received more than $1 million for their first books.

When she’d finished, she cold-emailed the draft to an agent whose clients she respected and he took her on. (The Civil War serves as a divider between parts one and two, and is not depicted.)Īfter graduating from Stanford with a degree in English, Gyasi studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop-considered by many to be the best MFA program in the country-and began serious work on Homegoing. The book ends around the turn of the 21st century. Each subsequent chapter tells the story of one of their descendants, alternating between Ghana and America and showing how the characters were affected by major political events from the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act through the Harlem Renaissance to the heroin epidemic. While one marries a British officer and leads a life of relative privilege at the Cape Coast Castle, the other is captured and sold into slavery.

This contrast gave Homegoing its premise: The novel begins with two half-sisters growing up in Fante and Asante territory in the mid-18th century. “I was really struck also that there were women upstairs who maybe didn’t understand or realize what was going on underneath them.” “That juxtaposition of the majesty upstairs with the awfulness and despair downstairs really struck me,” she says. On her tour, Gyasi saw those two worlds up close for the first time. Others were kept in dungeons before being shipped of to the New World. At the castle, some of the local women married the British soldiers stationed there.

Homecoming book yaa