Fiction: A Story by Ghanaian-born Author Yaa Gyasi, Whose Debut Novel Sold for 7 Figures this Year

[Funmi Tofowomo Okelola]

http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2015/11/27/fiction-friday-a-story-by-ghanaian-born-author-yaa-gyasi-whose-debut-novel-sold-for-7-figures-this-year/

Fiction: A Story by Ghanaian-born Author Yaa Gyasi, Whose Debut Novel Sold for 7 Figures this Year

Homegoing: A Novel by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi, a Ghanaian-born writer raised in Alabama in the United States, made headlines earlier this year when it was announced that her debut novel had been purchased in a seven-figure deal ahead of the London Book Fair.

The North American rights were acquired at auction by Knopf, who fought off competition from nine other bidders.

At the time, Knopf’s Jordan Pavlin called Homegoing “as beautiful and relevant a novel as any I’ve ever read”, adding that Gyasi “writes about race and history and identity and love with astonishing authority”.

Translation rights for the novel have been sold for a “major deal” in Spanish, as well as in Norway, Sweden and Hungary.

Viking have taken on the book in the United Kingdom, with publisher Mary Mount calling it: “enormously ambitious, incredibly moving and deeply resonant”.

“This is a rare novel about how history infuses all of our lives,” Mount told The Guardian. “Yaa Gyasi has an incredible eye for character and sense of human emotion. It will be a hugely exciting novel to publish.”

Gyasi, who was 25 at the time of the book’s sale, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Berkeley, California.

Homegoing traces the descendants of two sisters, torn apart in 18th-century Africa, across three hundred years in Ghana and America:

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into different tribal villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and will live in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the empire. Esi, imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle’s women’s dungeon and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the tribal wars of Ghana to slavery and the Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the American South to the Great Migration to twentieth-century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi’s novel moves through histories and geographies and captures–with outstanding economy and force– the troubled spirit of our own nation. She has written a modern masterpiece.

The novel is due out from Knopf in June 2016.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who recently won the National Book Award for Between the World and Me, said:

Gyasi’s characters are so fully realised, so elegantly carved – very often I found myself longing to hear more. Craft is essential given the task Gyasi sets for herself – drawing not just a lineage of two sisters, but two related peoples. Gyasi is deeply concerned with the sin of selling humans on Africans, not Europeans. But she does not scold. She does not excuse. And she does not romanticise. The black Americans she follows are not overly virtuous victims. Sin comes in all forms, from selling people to abandoning children. I think I needed to read a book like this to remember what is possible. I think I needed to remember what happens when you pair a gifted literary mind to an epic task. Homegoing is an inspiration.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Gyasi’s characters are so fully realized, so elegantly carved—very often I found myself longing to hear more. Craft is essential given the task Gyasi sets for herself—drawing not just a lineage of two sisters, but two related peoples. Gyasi is deeply concerned with the sin of selling humans on Africans, not Europeans. But she does not scold. She does not excuse. And she does not romanticize. The black Americans she follows are not overly virtuous victims.  Sin comes in all forms, from selling people to abandoning children.  I think I needed to read a book like this to remember what is possible.  I think I needed to remember what happens when you pair a gifted literary mind to an epic task. Homegoing is an inspiration.”

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, National Book Award winning author of Between the World and Me


"Homegoing is a remarkable feat—a novel at once epic and intimate, capturing the moral weight of history as it bears down on individual struggles, hopes, and fears. A tremendous debut.” 

—Phil Klay, National Book Award winning author of Redeployment

About the Author

YAA GYASI was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Berkeley, California.              

Funmi Tofowomo Okelola

-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives. 

http://www.cafeafricana.com