Transcendent Kingdom Book Cover
Yaa Gyasi Headshot

Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.

Purchase Transcendent Kingdom