I’ve had Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi on my TBR for a few years and I had put off reading it from fear that it would be sad or tough. I shouldn’t have worried. While it deals with tough subjects and has sad moments, it is also a highly enjoyable read with a lot of joy in its pages.

Effia and Esi, born in the 1750s on the Gold Coast of Africa, are sisters but they have never met. Raised in different villages, as they reach marriageable age they are in very similar positions, with promising local matches, but fate has something rather different in store.

Effia is married off to a white trader. She loves him but can never fit in with the other wives in the British fortress. Esi is captured when war breaks out between tribes and sold into slavery. She is shipped to America from the very fortress where her sister is living.

Gyasi traces the lineages of these two women through to the 21st century, through them telling the story of Ghana and the USA. From plantation slavery to missionaries, from colonialism to Harlem slums, there’s a lot to cover here and a lot of it is serious stuff, but this book has enough light moments and warm characters to never feel heavy.

“Esi, who had not spent more than an hour away from her mother’s sight in her life, couldn’t imagine any secrets. She knew the feel of her and the smell of her. She knew how many colours were in her irises and she knew each crooked tooth…Abronoma continued in a whisper… ‘There was one before you. And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.’”

With each chapter we have a new narrator – a new generation in one of the two family trees (which are helpfully listed at the start of the book in case you get lost). This is a risky structure, not sticking with any lead character for more than 30 pages, and at first I was sad each time a chapter ended and I had to say goodbye. But I soon learned that every new character was worth getting to know, each a unique personality who lived a unique life. Some chapters cover a whole life, some only a few days at a key point in their life. All are brilliant.

Chapters that stayed with me in particular include that of H, arrested for “studyin’ a white woman” and sent in chains into an Alabama coal mine. After serving his time, he is able to make a decent living continuing to work as a miner, but the coal dust cuts his life cruelly short. (Perhaps this struck a chord as it resembles my own family history, minus the racist arrest and chain gang part.) And I also loved the story of Akua, raised at a white missionary’s school and between that and her vivid nightmares she is mistrusted by everyone in her husband’s village, especially her mother-in-law. Her story contains terrible tragedy but also love and sweetness.

It’s a real achievement, covering 250-odd years of history and 14 narrators in 300 pages without it ever feeling rushed or sketched.

Published 2016 by YNG Books.

Source: I honestly don’t remember. I think I bought it myself from an actual physical bookshop but I didn’t make a note or put a picture of it on Instagram 🙂