Book Log 2022 #28: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

An Asante woman named Maame has two daughters, half-sisters who live in separate villages in what is today Ghana. One winds up marrying the British governor of a local slave forts and remains in Africa, while the other sister is captured in a raid and enslaved, sent through the fort her sister lives in to North America, where she winds up at a plantation in the US south. The book follows their stories and those of some of their descendants, up to the present day.

Gyasi, who was born in Ghana and raised in the US, wrote this book after her first trip back to Ghana, where she was struck by the difference in the upper levels of the slave fort and the dungeons, and how the people living upstairs were unaware of what the people in the dungeons were going through. 

I don't know that I would have picked this book up on its own, and I'm very thankful to the reading challenge that led me to it.  It's wonderfully written, both story lines are engaging and the characters fully realized. It's also impressive that this is Gyasi's debut novel. Recommended.