The novel explores a wide variety of themes, but the most prominent concern is the tension between science and religion, particularly the Evangelical Christian background that seems to haunt Gifty as she pursues her neuroscience career. While Gifty attempts to pursue her work, her severely-depressed mother comes to visit, causing Gifty to reflect on her family’s past. Her research interest seems to stem from her past experience of watching her older brother struggle with addiction. In Transcendent Kingdom, we follow Gifty, a doctoral student in neuroscience, as she studies mice in her attempts to understand reward seeking behavior. Both novels are masterfully written, but this novel offers a microscopic perspective to go along with the macroscopic approach of Gyasi’s previous work. While Homegoing (2016) offers a family’s history over generations and across oceans, Transcendent Kingdom settles into the details of one nuclear family’s experience. Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom is an incredible follow-up and companion to her first novel.
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