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    Transcendent Kingdom: A Read with Jenna Pick: A novel
    Unavailable
    Transcendent Kingdom: A Read with Jenna Pick: A novel
    Unavailable
    Transcendent Kingdom: A Read with Jenna Pick: A novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    Transcendent Kingdom: A Read with Jenna Pick: A novel

    Written by Yaa Gyasi

    Narrated by Bahni Turpin

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK! • Finalist for the WOMEN'S PRIZE

    Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama    .

    Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine 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. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.

    Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
    Release dateSep 1, 2020
    ISBN9780593215319
    Unavailable
    Transcendent Kingdom: A Read with Jenna Pick: A novel

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    Reviews for Transcendent Kingdom

    4/5

    582 ratings60 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Oh my goodness. Words fail me in trying to articulate how this book made me feel. Much like my reaction to Homegoing, I nearly ugly cried at the ending and am recommending it to anyone who’s into contemporary fiction that delves into timeless questions about familial behavioral cycles, trauma recovery, and the endless pursuit of finding yourself.

      I am convinced now that I will read anything Gyasi writes from now until the end of time.
    • 4/5
      I listened to this in audiobook format.

      This novel is about a young Ghanaian-American woman, a scientist, coming to terms with the relationships in her life (especially with her mother), her losses, and her Evangelical Christian upbringing. The plot is anchored by her mother falling into a deep depression and moving from Alabama to Stanford to live with her. There are a lot of flashbacks and those story lines are integral to her current situation and the plot progression. It's more mature than a coming of age novel but similar. The themes are not new but really well executed-- meaningful and touching without being depressing or melodramatic. This short novel is worth reading.
    • 5/5
      TW: death, trauma, racism, addiction, mental ill health

      This is an excellent and almost unremittingly painful read. The POV character is the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants to Alabama, where she grows up in the only black family in her church. She is working on her PhD in neuro-science as the book moves back and forth in time, largely (entirely? I can’t recall and I read the audiobook so can’t check) through the writing, or rereading, of her journal. Transcendent Kingdom deals with the strains of immigration, racism, evangelical Christianity, family breakup, relationships, mental ill health, drug addiction, overdose, and death. The experiments the protagonist is doing require surgery and implants into the brain’s of mice.

      Transcendent Kingdom is very good, but be sure you are up for it, because there are not a lot of breaks from the depth of sorrow the book conveys. Perhaps it would not have as harsh an effect on people who have not been affected by any of these things in their own lives, or who have more slack around them than I currently do. I read the book because it deals with sibling death, and I lost my brother a couple of years ago. His health was impacted by his own addictions which, combined, led to his early death, and I believe that everyone in my family struggles with the effects of generational trauma. So although my story is not the same, it is similar enough, and close enough still, to make this a very hard book to read.
    • 3/5
      Gifty is a girl of evangelical faith who becomes apathetic towards God after the death of her brother and her mother's depression. As a young woman, Gifty pursues neuroscience as a way to understand something of her brother's death but all the while reflecting on what is missing in her spiritual life. Seeking a reconciliation of her beliefs, her Ghanian-American culture, and the lab work she does, she reflects on her past, her familial relationships and friendships. Introspective and contemplative, it's a novel incorporating Christian philosophy and identitarian values even as the protagonist tries to move beyond them-- only to circle back. Overall a tepid read and a disappointing sophomore effort from the author of Homegoing but it may appeal to those who are experiencing a crisis of faith.
    • 4/5
      Transcendent Kingdom follows Gifty as she completes her neuroscience research on addiction and reward-seeking behavior in mice after her brother died of an overdose when she was a child. It alternates between her now, working on this research and taking care of her mother, and memories she has from childhood along with journal entries from that time period.

      The portrayal of Gifty and her relationship with Christianity, the religion she had been raised in, are incredibly well-developed, and I really related to this aspect of her life. Gifty's descriptions of how she interacted with the world around her as a Black woman were also interesting, and played a big part of her character and who she was as a person.

      The writing was beautiful, and the details made it incredibly easy to read. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

      It would have been good to get a little more clarity when she was switching the timeline, as it was sometimes difficult to tell what time of her life was being talked about in the moment. I also think it would have done well without the epilogue. I personally would have liked it being left at just the end of chapter 54, without all the loose ends tied up or the tidying that the epilogue gave and a messy ending would have served it well.

      Overall, a really good read, and one I will be reading again.
    • 4/5
      Liked this story about a girl born in Ghana who grew up in a troubled religious family in Alabama and becomes a neuroscientist. Calmly moving, but the short, lyrical chapters made for easy reading.
    • 5/5
      Gifty, the narrator of Yaa Gyasi’s second published novel, is a 27 year old PhD candidate in neurosciences at Stanford, who conducts experiments on mice to elucidate the neural pathways involved in addiction and reward seeking behavior. On the surface she checks all the boxes for a modern immigrant success story: she is the daughter of two Ghanaians who emigrated to the United States to seek better opportunities for themselves and their two children, Gifty and her older brother Nana; she overcame a troubled and impoverished childhood in Alabama to achieve academic success, including a bachelor’s degree from Harvard; and she is devoted to her family, particularly her mother, a devout Christian who worked in menial jobs to provide for her children.

      However, there is a darker underside to Gifty’s story. She is motivated to study addiction because Nana, a promising but troubled athlete, became hooked on opioids after a physician gave him a prescription for OxyContin after a sports injury and ultimately died of a heroin overdose when she was young, and the loss of her closest companion and most devoted supporter devastated both her and her mother, who has suffered from severe depression and suicidal behaviors since the death of her son. Gifty, because of her sheltered upbringing, family tragedy, and struggles as an immigrant, an outsider in her home town in Alabama and as a Black woman scientist, keeps her personal life and experiences to herself, and, in many ways, views her mother, late brother and herself from the standpoint of a scientist, as an apparent coping mechanism and because she has yet to learn who she truly is, and this lack of self-awareness greatly impacts and impedes her relationships with friends and lovers.

      My impression of "Transcendent Kingdom" was a mixed one immediately after I finished reading it, as I was frustrated with Gifty and her mother, both of whom I found to be inscrutable and, in many ways, unlikable. However, after giving it some thought and watching an interview with the author about the book, I realized that this characterization was entirely intentional on Yaa Gyasi’s part, which made me appreciate what she was doing considerably more. I’ve upped my initial 3½ star rating to 4½ stars, and although "Transcendent Kingdom" is a very different novel than her début, "Homegoing", I would recommend it just as highly.
    • 4/5
      Gifty experiences more loss and denial than any human should experience, yet her thought processes are incredibly relatable and full of hope. She brings you into a world of intellectual puzzle solving, incredible patience that reads as self denial, and wholesale pure loving discovery of what is real about her family and her ethnic, national, and religious origins. She is strong for herself and able to select and make some amazing connections as you cheer her on. She is always accepting of the chances in life to discover and validate her true and mysterious possible self. She refuses to look back, and brings herself forward into a world that holds the right beauties and comforts she has needed and selected, and finds the ones that perfectly soothe and smooth her strong and lovely soul.
    • 4/5
      An interesting pick for a Go Big Read book. This is the first book I've read by Gyasi and I found it very life-like... which is to say many important themes jumbled together. This book of fiction does not specifically look at any one issue, but many issues intertwined - the way we live our lives. It's very much a personal narrative with so many universal themes. Recommend.
    • 3/5
      I revisited this book after finding out it had been nominated for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is the story of a Ghanian family that relocated to Alabama, where they deal with racial intolerance. Other themes include women in science, religion, addiction, mental health, grief, and protagonist Gifty’s fraught relationship with her strict mother, who suffers from depression.

      I am pleased to see a black woman studying neuroscience as a protagonist. The writing is strong. Gifty struggles to reconcile her faith with science: “But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.”

      There are several lengthy digressions into science, philosophy, and religion. It is a book I would call “interesting,” but not particularly compelling. It goes in so many directions that it seems a bit unfocused. I enjoy Gyasi’s writing style. I loved her debut, Homegoing, and plan to read her future works.
    • 3/5
      Three stars, mainly because of the experiments on addiction and depression.
      I hated the religious part.

      Mental illness: it runs in my family, being of Irish descent. I hate when people with mental illness refuse to take medication for it. It's one thing when they didn't take it because antidepressants weren't invented yet. But it's another thing to refuse to take it when they're available.
      From as long as I can remember, my father acted out his mental illness: depression. He would slam his head against the wall in rage. My older brother was particularly affected by mental illness: he refused to take medication for it, saying it would " change him." What changed him was going unmedicated all those years: it made him bipolar.
      My older sister was killed by depression: she jumped off a building at her University, split her spleen, and died a few hours later.

      The protagonist's mother has depression that she succumbs to, and lays in her bed for months at a time, despite having a child who still needs her, after her son dies. She stops taking the medication that she was given after she was hospitalized.

      The protagonist in this book is trying to identify in the brains of mice what is the factor in the brain that makes addicts. Being an ethical vegan, I'm completely against animal abuse, but it was ongoing throughout the whole book, so I had to try to set it aside in order to finish the book.
      The brother's of the protagonist name is Nana, and it was a distraction to me because my daughter's cat's name is Nana, and my ex-husband's family calls grandmothers Nanas.
      "... The question I was trying to answer, to use Mrs Pasternack's terms, was: could optogenetics be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses where there are issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough? In other words, many, many years down the line, once we figured out a way to identify and isolate the parts of the brain that are involved in these illnesses, once we've jumped all the necessary hurdles to making this research useful to animals other than mice, could this science work on the people who need it the most?"

      "The mice who can't stop pushing the lever, even after being shocked dozens of times, are, neurologically, the ones who are most interesting to me. By the time my mother came to stay with me in california, my team and I were in the process of identifying which neurons were firing or not firing whenever the mice decided to press the lever despite knowing the risks. We were trying to use blue light to get the mice to stop pressing the lever, to "turn on," so to speak, the neurons that weren't functioning properly in warning those mice away from risk."

      The protagonist is brought up in a church where, like most churches, you are supposedly going to hell if you're not baptized. Nana, the protagonist's brother, asks his Church's Pastor (P.T.) one time a question:
      " 'so what if there's a tiny village somewhere in Africa that is so incredibly remote that no one has found it yet, which means no Christians have been able to go there as missionaries and spread the gospel, right? Are all of those villagers going to hell, even though there's no way that they could have heard about jesus?'
      PT's smirk set in and his eyes narrowed at Nana a bit. 'God would have made a way for them to hear the good news,' he said.
      'Okay, but hypothetically.'
      'Hypothetically, dude? Yeah, they're going to hell.'
      I was shocked by this answer, by the smugly satisfied way in which P.T. had consigned an entire helpless village of Africans to eternal damnation without so much as a blink. He didn't spend even the length of an exhale thinking about Nana's question, working on a way out. He didn't say, for example, that God doesn't deal in hypotheticals, a perfectly reasonable answer to a not entirely reasonable question. His willingness to play into Nana's game was itself a sign that he saw God as a kind of prize that only some were good enough to win. It was like he wanted hell for those villagers, like he believed there were people for whom hell is a given, deserved."
      Yeah, Christianity is a cult.

      Having depression myself, I've always fought off thoughts of suicide. But having a sister who committed suicide, when I was 18 years old, I saw what it did to my mother, and the rest of our family. It has stopped me from acting on those thoughts. But at this stage, when fascism is encroaching on our country, when Hope of anything but chaos is seemingly dead, these thoughts are harder and harder to fight off.
      "what's the point? Became a refrain for me as I went through the motions. One of my mice in particularl brought those words out every time I observed him. He was hopelessly addicted to Ensure, pressing the lever so often that he developed a psychosomatic limp in anticipation of the random shocks. Still, he soldiered on, hobbling to that lever to press and press and press again. Soon he would be one of the mice I used in optogenetics, but not before I watched him repeat his doomed actions with that beautifully pure, deluded hope of an addict, the hope that says, this time will be different. This time I'll make it out okay.
      'what's the point of all of this?' Is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is 'because God deems it so,' we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is 'I don't know,' or worse still, 'nothing'? "
      That's why I read almost constantly, so I can blot out the world.




    • 5/5
      This reads like a true memoir, episodes from different time periods retold as current events trigger memories, facts about neuroscience or religion jumping in as Gifty tries to understand what has happened. I was so involved in learning who Gifty was as a person that I was surprised when I got to the end and re-realized this was just a novel.
      The main focus of the book is Gifty's coming to terms with her adored older brother's addiction to narcotics following a sports injury. She is telling this from her current position as a PhD candidate studying the neurology of reward-seeking behavior, and as an adult caring for her mother who has (again) become near-catatonic in her depression. A number of the issues she deals with have to do with her upbringing in a paternalistic evangelical culture, her experience of being filled with the Spirit and then her disillusionment when prayers didn't help her brother. It is this aspect which had the most compelling questions for me as a reader, these sections which had sentences I felt I should copy down to read again and again. But I didn't; my life was so chaotic that I could only read this book in short snatches. I'll save it for re-reading.
      The experiences of a child who immigrated to the US with her family is tangentially included, but not addressed as fully as, say, "Breath, Eyes, Memory" by Danticat or "On Earth We're Briifly Gorgeous" by Vuong. This aspect comes out strongest when she talks about things she didn't understand, e.g. about her body's changes or about 'acceptable" kinds of questions to ask, which she attributes to her immigration & her mother being away from home working most of her life.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book so much. Yaa Gyasi somehow managed to write a real page turner about all of life's heavy topics. This is also probably the most comprehensive and compassionate look at opioid addiction in fiction that I've ever read. Just excellent from start to finish.
    • 4/5
      Wish it was longer.
    • 4/5
      A moving story of a young woman of Ghanese descent who tries to find a way to live life as a scientist and maintain her faith at the same time. Set against a family life that is turbulent in many ways that often defy her attempts to comprehend and deal with them. The first person narration is one of the best aspects of this inspiring yet sad tale; especially the nonlinear way that the author provides details without leading to any confusion for the reader.
    • 5/5
      Gyasi covers so many profound themes about life such as love, loss, grief, faith, belonging, addiction and more, without being didactic or sentimental. This line sums it up for me: "But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction."
    • 4/5
      Gifty, PhD candidate for neuroscience at Stanford tries to balance her life with science at work and religion from home Her brother Issac died from an overdose while her church-going mother tried to make sense of it. The book put me in a spiritual zone thinking about her family and why things happened the way they did. So many words I read were a reflection from my mother who always had a Bible beside her bed when she was alive. While science gives us facts, sometimes we just need to feel the love from a greater force.
    • 3/5
      This is about Gifty, a woman whose family immigrated to Alabama from Ghana. The book handles a lot of themes and issues: Gifty is a scientist, so there are scenes about women of color in academia. She was raised as an Evangelical Christian, but lost her faith when her brother died of an opioid addiction and the church community provided little support to Gifty and her mother, who went into severe depression. The book addresses racism, religion, addition, faith, and mental illness. Those are a lot of issues to cram into a fairly short book, and I think Gyasi might have been trying to tackle too much, because the book seems to lack a coherent message, and the end feels very abrupt.

      The writing is very good, and there is a lot to think about in this book - it would be good for a book club because there's a lot to discuss. I appreciated Gyasi's nuanced handling of religion - so many people think that religion and science are diametrically opposed, but Gifty finds a middle ground between them, and understands the important role religion can play in people's lives.
    • 5/5
      I really loved this. The writing style is so inviting yet provides so much to dig into at the same time.
    • 4/5
      Ghanan daughter in US whose mother has a mental illness and brother becomes addicted to drugs. She is brilliant and enters a neuroscience field but has relationship problems. Not a happy book.
    • 4/5
      A powerful story about a strong child who turns into a strong woman trying to save her family. She loses a brother to drug overdose that she was so very close to. She cares for a mother dealing with depression who won't leave her bed. Meanwhile Gifty becomes a brilliant scientist. Threaded through out this novel is Gifty relationship to God and her relationship to science . Both do not provide her with the answers she needs to get on with her life.The experiments she performs on her mice are her search for answers into her own messed up family life.
    • 5/5
      This was just stunning and heartbreaking. I loved Gyasi approached the debate of science vs. religion.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing look at adversity and the isolation that can follow it.

      Gifty is a sixth year PhD candidate in neuroscience studying addiction in mice.

      She is from a family of immigrants from Ghana who came to Alabama. They were welcomed in a white evangelical church and lived in a white neighborhood.

      But then Gifty’s father returned to Ghana, abandoning his family in the US.

      The life of an impoverished family headed by a single mother was hard. While Gifty’s brother Nana was a basketball star, they found approval and support in their community and church.

      But Nana had a tendon injury and was prescribed OxyContin. He became addicted and the community support dissolved – after all, blacks are known for their addictions. And life became harder.

      Nana succumbed to his addiction. Gifty’s mother succumbed to grief, spending long periods of time not being able to get out of bed.

      Gifty turned away from people and to science for answers. She longed for the evangelical church she had known in Ghana, but seemed to no longer be able to connect to God.

      In a perfect world with a perfect ending, all could pull themselves up by their bootstraps (and maybe some help from faith). But real life is a struggle and not everyone makes it.

      This is a very empathetic look at what addiction does to families when those in the community see ‘nothing but an addict’. Racism, anti-immigrant sentiments and isolation all rear their heads.

      For me this would have been a five star read, but I disliked the last chapter, which seemed rather tacked on to me.
    • 4/5
      It wasn’t a great sign: I waited several weeks to write a thumbnail review of “Transcendent Kingdom” – and I needed to check out book summaries to remember exactly what I had read. True, this tale of a child of immigrant parents from Ghana provides food for thought about mental illness and the devastating fallout it can cause. But there was a bit too much introspection for my liking. One reviewer reported “becoming impatient for it to reach its conclusion.” I shared the same impatience. Still, I did find Gifty to be an intriguing and “gritty” protagonist.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this story of how faith moves to science moves to faith - and the point of life is to continue exploring.
    • 5/5
      This book reads like a memoir and I have no way of knowing how autobiographical this novel is. It is the story of a woman born in Ghana whose family immigrates to Alabama in her youth - the same story as the author. Not to give too much away, this family struggles with addiction and mental health issues and an absent father who goes back to Ghana after a while. The main character, Gifty, has two major themes in her life - a passionate work ethic and will to achieve (a Phd. student) and a background in strict Pentecostalism as her church background. I really liked the book.
    • 4/5
      I didn't enjoy this as much as Homegoing. I recommended it for my book Club but it felt too much like homework to read it.
    • 4/5
      This book is truly transcendent. Gifty is the child of immigrant parents from Ghana. She is a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University researching the brain cells that trigger addiction after her brother dies of an overdose. Gifty struggles to make sense of a childhood where her mother withholds her love and fills the void with religion.
    • 5/5
      I'm really not sure how well summarizing this novel's plot (such that it is) is really helpful here. At any rate, though, the story centers on Gifty, a neuroscience grad student at Stanford working on addiction and reward-seeking behavior in mice. Her family are Ghanaian immigrants living in Alabama; she grew up mostly with her mother and brother, and her brother died of an overdose in high school. In a lot of ways, the story is centered around grief, and I feel like it's fair to describe it as a meditation on grief and addiction and love and faith and science.

      I really liked this. I can definitely see why people might not love it--the story's completely nonlinear, assembling episodes from Gifty's life with absolutely no chronological ordering; and there's really not that much of a traditional plot--but I found it hard-hitting and lovely. Though I guess that I haven't really read that many, I think of myself as generally really liking books that discuss themes of faith and science, and this one was no exception.
    • 4/5
      I listened to Ms Gyasi's first book, Homegoing, and it was such a great experience I didn't hesitate to get the audiobook download for this, her second book. I wasn't quite as impressed by this book as by Homegoing but it was still an engaging listen. Homegoing is a hard act to follow.

      Gifty is a doctoral student in neuroscience at Stanford University when she gets a phone call from her mother's pastor in Alabama that her mother is deeply depressed. Gifty asks the pastor to send her to California and says she will look after her. Once her mother arrives she crawls into Gifty's bed and stays there for days. Having her mother in her apartment causes Gifty to reminisce about her childhood when her mother went through a similar depressive episode. That one was triggered by Gifty's older brother's opiod overdose death. He became addicted to opiods after injuring himself during a basketball game. Gifty's research project was inspired by this tragedy as she examines the brains of mice to see if addictions can be reversed. As a child Gifty was quite religious but after her brother's death she turned away from religion. However, she still has a belief in God and struggles to reconcile this with the precepts of science. The relationship between Gifty and her mother was never particularly close; her mother made no secret of the fact that the brother was her favourite child and she had never wanted Gifty (although it is interesting that the name chosen for the child means, in English, something treasured). This emotional lack has made Gifty unwilling to enter into any other close relationships. So while her mother lies almost comatose in her bedroom Gifty relives her life and finally comes to a realization that she can't help her mother until she opens up to other people.

      There are some interesting themes in this book but I'm not sure they were successfully tied together.