Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi (2016)
“Seven generations of two Black family lines — one trapped in slavery, one complicit in it — and the fire that connects them all the way to the present.”
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Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
Beloved
Toni Morrison
The definitive novel on slavery's psychic wound — where Gyasi expands across time, Morrison concentrates on a single haunting with supernatural intensity
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Alex Haley
The original multi-generational Black family saga tracing African origins through American slavery — Homegoing is in direct conversation with Haley's project, updated for contemporary scholarship
The Known World
Edward P. Jones
Equally unflinching on Black complicity in the slave economy — Jones's Virginia county reveals the same moral complexity as Gyasi's Cape Coast Castle
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead
Another major contemporary novel of slavery's legacy — Whitehead uses speculative geography to make the underground railroad literal; Gyasi uses structural architecture to do the same work
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
The foundational West African novel about colonialism's disruption — Achebe's Igbo Nigeria is the literary ancestor of Gyasi's Gold Coast Ghana
A Mercy
Toni Morrison
Morrison's novel of early American slavery and its damage to women of multiple races — shares Homegoing's interest in what the slave trade did to women's bodies and relationships