Transcendent Kingdom

By: Yaa Gyasi
Translated by: Ahmed Al-Maaini

From the award-winning author of Homegoing comes a powerful and deeply intimate novel about faith, science, grief, and the search for meaning in the face of loss.

Transcendent Kingdom follows Gifty, a brilliant neuroscience PhD student at Stanford, who studies reward-seeking behavior in mice—a quest to understand the addiction that consumed her brother and the depression that paralyzed her mother. As she navigates the corridors of scientific inquiry, she finds herself haunted by memories of her Ghanaian-American childhood in Alabama, torn between the empirical clarity of science and the aching pull of faith.

Yaa Gyasi masterfully explores the intersections of belief and reason, inheritance and identity, the body and the soul. Through prose both tender and incisive, she delves into the quiet devastations of a family fractured by immigration, tragedy, and silence—and the enduring human drive to find light in darkness.

Transcendent Kingdom is a meditation on resilience and redemption, on the fragile threads that bind us to hope, and on the courage to reconcile intellect with emotion, doubt with devotion, and science with the mysteries of the spirit.