Recommendations
Books Like Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Seven generations of two lineages across the Atlantic world
If the multigenerational structure and the Atlantic slave trade's dual consequences in Africa and America hooked you, here are eight books that extend this historical and formal reach.
- 1
Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of slavery's trauma haunting the living — the American slavery tradition Homegoing belongs to, in a different and complementary formal mode.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winner revises the slave escape narrative — published the same year as Homegoing, both novels re-engaging with American slavery as urgent contemporary subject.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThings Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
The foundational Igbo novel and the West African literary tradition Homegoing begins from — the encounter with colonialism in the same historical world that Solomon and Effia's descendants inhabit.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Known World
by Edward P. Jones
Jones's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of a Black Virginia county's free Black slaveholders — a different formal approach (ensemble cast) to the same history, equally rigorous and equally moving.
- 5
Buy on AmazonAmericanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's Nigerian-American diaspora novel — the contemporary companion to Homegoing's historical account; what it means to be African in America now rather than then.
- 6
Buy on AmazonRoots
by Alex Haley
The foundational African-American multigenerational saga that Homegoing updates — tracing an African-American family's history from the Gambia to post-Civil War America; the predecessor Gyasi is in dialogue with.
- 7
Buy on AmazonTranscendent Kingdom
by Yaa Gyasi
Gyasi's second novel — a character study rather than a multigenerational saga, but the same Ghanaian-American perspective; Gifty's neuroscience PhD and her family's grief.
- 8
Buy on AmazonWe Need New Names
by NoViolet Bulawayo
Bulawayo's Zimbabwean-American novel — a young African woman in America navigating diaspora; the contemporary companion to Homegoing's historical account of the same Atlantic world.
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