Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

“An inspiration” – Ta-Nehisi Coats.  This novel was on the New York Time best-seller list for a few weeks. It is set partly in Huntsville, Alabama, where the author, born in Ghana, grew up and partly at Stanford University where the author did her undergraduate work. Her first book, Homegoing, inspired by a trip she took back to Ghana, won four of the most prestigious honors for a first novel and made her a millionaire. Transcendent Kingdom follows the protagonist, Gifty, a doctoral student at Stanford who is studying addiction behaviors in mice while grieving for her bother who died of an overdose and taking care of her mother who is suffering from severe depression. Raised in a fundamentalist church in Alabama, Gifty flashes back to the answers that heritage provides as contrasted with what science has to offer. "Yaa Gyasi’s profoundly moving second novel takes place in the vast, fragile landscape where the mysteries of God and the certainties of science collide. Through deliberate a