Homegoing

Some novelists unpack a single day in their 300 pages, while others unfurl a quarter of a millennium. Gyasi, ambitiously, does the latter, tracing the parallel lineages begun by two West African half-sisters—one that remains in Ghana and one that extends, via a slave ship, to America—from the 1750s to today. Her language is modest, but her imagination and her fury are immense, and the effect of the fourteen braided but distinct lives she invents is to make you think that there may be no better way to comprehend the devastating but always complexly human ways that the history of enslavement, migration, and colonialism have shaped, but not entirely determined, individual lives.