Reading Order
Homegoing Reading Order
Homegoing (2016) by Yaa Gyasi is a debut novel of extraordinary scope and formal ambition — a multigenerational saga that begins in 18th-century Ghana and follows two half-sisters and their descendants across seven generations to the present day, alternating between the African side (Effia, who marries a British slave-trader and stays in Ghana) and the American side (Esi, who is sold into slavery and transported to America). Each chapter follows a different descendant of one of the two sisters, from the slave dungeons of Cape Coast Castle to the plantations of the American South, from Harlem during the Great Migration to the civil rights movement to the present-day crack epidemic, tracing how the history of the Atlantic slave trade shapes the lives of individuals who may not even know their family's history. Gyasi's formal choice — alternating chapter-by-chapter between the two lineages across seven generations — creates a sense of historical parallel and inevitability: while Esi's descendants in America are being enslaved, Effia's descendants in Ghana are profiting from the trade; while Effia's descendants experience British colonialism, Esi's descendants in America experience the specific degradations of American racism. The effect is of a vast historical canvas with a precise human focus: each chapter is almost a self-contained short story, and Gyasi makes the reader care about each individual even as she is building a picture of a history that exceeds any individual's perspective. Homegoing is the most successful recent attempt to do in fiction what the historical scholarship of the Atlantic world has been doing for decades: to tell the story of the slave trade as a single event with consequences on both sides of the ocean.
Where to start
Homegoing — Knopf first edition or any subsequent printing. The novel's alternating structure is immediately apparent; track the two lineages (left margin of the family tree at the front of the book) as you go.
Complete Homegoing Book List
- 1Buy
Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi·2016·The novel — Effia and Esi's descendants across seven generations, from 18th-century Ghana to present-day America; the Atlantic slave trade as a family history. - 2Buy
Transcendent Kingdom
Yaa Gyasi·2020·Gyasi's second novel — Gifty, a Ghanaian-American neuroscience PhD student, her brother's opioid addiction, and her mother's depression; a very different mode from Homegoing but the same Ghanaian-American perspective. - 3Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the American slavery tradition that Homegoing belongs to; the trauma of slavery inhabiting the living, in a different but complementary formal mode. - 4Buy
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead·2016·Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the slave escape narrative in a revisionist mode; published the same year as Homegoing, both novels reengaging with American slavery history. - 5Buy
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe·1958·Achebe's foundational Igbo novel — the West African side of the Atlantic world that Homegoing begins from; the encounter with colonialism in the same historical period. - 6Buy
The Roots
Alex Haley·1976·Haley's foundational African-American multigenerational saga — the predecessor to Homegoing in tracing an African-American family's history from Africa to America; the historical and cultural model that Gyasi is updating. - 7Buy
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie·2013·Adichie's Nigerian-American diaspora novel — the contemporary companion to Homegoing; the African experiencing America in the present rather than the past. - 8Buy
We Need New Names
NoViolet Bulawayo·2013·Bulawayo's Zimbabwean-American novel — a young African woman in America; the contemporary diaspora companion to Homegoing's historical account.
Homegoing — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Homegoing about?
Homegoing begins in 18th-century Ghana (then the Gold Coast) with two half-sisters who never meet: Effia, who marries the British governor of Cape Coast Castle and lives in comfort above the slave dungeons; and Esi, who is captured during a tribal conflict and sold into the slave trade, transported through those same dungeons to America. The novel then alternates between their descendants across seven generations: Effia's lineage in Ghana, who experience British colonialism, the cocoa trade, and Ghanaian independence; and Esi's lineage in America, who experience slavery, the Civil War, the Great Migration, Harlem in the 1930s, the civil rights era, the crack epidemic, and the contemporary prison-industrial complex. Each chapter is named after and focused on a different descendant — fifteen chapters in total — and the novel ends in the present day when members of the two lineages almost, but not quite, connect.
How does Homegoing's structure work?
The novel's structure is alternating: chapter 1 is Effia (Ghana, 18th century), chapter 2 is Esi (America, 18th century), chapter 3 is Effia's daughter Abena (Ghana, early 19th century), chapter 4 is Esi's daughter Ness (America, early 19th century), and so on through seven generations. There is a family tree at the front of the novel that maps both lineages. Each chapter is essentially a self-contained short story — a complete account of one person's life and the historical forces that shaped it — but the alternating structure creates parallels: while Ness in America is enslaved on a plantation, Abena in Ghana is dealing with the consequences of the cocoa trade. The parallels are not always exact, but they create a sense of a single historical event (the Atlantic slave trade) with consequences that are simultaneous on both sides of the ocean.
Is Homegoing historically accurate?
Homegoing is historical fiction — it draws on historical research but is not a documentary account. Gyasi spent time in Ghana researching the novel, including visiting Cape Coast Castle and the slave dungeons. The historical periods and events she portrays — the Atlantic slave trade, the tribal confederacies that participated in it, American slavery, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, the crack epidemic — are accurately portrayed in their broad outlines, though the specific characters and their stories are fictional. Gyasi is interested in what historical fiction can do that scholarship cannot: make the abstract human, give individual faces to the statistics of the slave trade.
How does Homegoing compare to earlier African-American multigenerational sagas?
Homegoing is in dialogue with Alex Haley's Roots (1976), which traced an African-American family's history from the Gambia to post-Civil War America and became one of the best-selling books in American history. Gyasi updates Haley's project in several ways: where Haley was primarily interested in the American story (the African sections are relatively brief), Gyasi gives equal weight to both sides; where Haley was tracing a single lineage, Gyasi traces two parallel lineages simultaneously; and where Haley was committed to historical accuracy (or what he presented as such), Gyasi is self-consciously a novelist working with historical material. Both novels share the fundamental project of making the history of the Atlantic slave trade personal and specific through the device of a family history.
What should I read after Homegoing?
After Homegoing, Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom (2020) is the natural next step — a very different novel (a character study rather than a multigenerational saga) but the same Ghanaian-American perspective. For the American slavery tradition, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad are essential. For the Ghanaian and West African literary tradition, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born are important context. For comparable multigenerational diaspora fiction, Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003) and Laleh Ahmadi's work are significant.
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