An intelligent, beautiful and healing read: «Homegoing» by Yaa Gyasi at Linguae Bookshop in Girona.

“Homegoing”—the title is taken from an old African-American belief that death allowed an enslaved person’s spirit to travel back to Africa. It is rooted, like the Bible, in original sin.

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and becomes a truly great American novel.

Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow and its soaring beauty. Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in Cape Coast Castle. Her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons. She’s sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America. Here her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana. The other follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration. From the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem.

Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time.