A Quest to Understand Suffering in Yaa Gyasi’s Novel ‘Transcendent Kingdom’

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KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Following her critically-acclaimed debut novel "Homegoing," novelist Yaa Gyasi returns with “Transcendent Kingdom.” The story follows Gifty, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University. After losing her brother to a heroin overdose and while caring for her suicidal mother, she is determined to find a scientific reason for suffering. But even as Gifty embarks on her scientific quest, she finds herself longing for the faith of her childhood to help reckon with her family’s pain. Like Gyasi, the character Gifty comes from an immigrant family from Ghana and grew up in an evangelical household in Alabama. We'll talk to Gyasi, who spent time in California as an undergraduate at Stanford, about the book and the desire to understand human pain and suffering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:00.0	From KQVD Public Radio in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim.
1:02.8	Coming up on forum, writer Yad Jassy joins us.
1:07.7	She is a new novel about a Stanford student searching for a scientific basis for suffering as she represses her own pain from the loss of her brother and from having
1:11.3	a suicidal mother. Transcendent Kingdom is Jase's second novel after the phenomenal success
1:17.0	of her debut, Homegoing.
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