Photo of Yaa Gyasi

Ten Evenings

Yaa Gyasi

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“We humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.”

Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi’s follow-up to her acclaimed, bestselling Homegoing is powerful, raw, and intimate. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a Ghanaian immigrant family ravaged by depression and addiction—a searing novel of faith, science, religion, and love.

Transcendent Kingdom introduces us to Gifty, a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford, studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. 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. Turning to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, Gifty finds herself hungering for her evangelical childhood faith, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her debut novel, Homegoing, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” honors for 2016, and the American Book Award. She lives in Brooklyn.

“Absolutely transcendent. A gorgeously woven narrative about a woman trying to survive the grief of a brother lost to addiction and a mother trapped in depression while pursuing her ambitions. Not a word or idea out of place.”

ROXANE GAY

Books

Copies of Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom are available with signed bookplates from White Whale Bookstore

Sponsored by UPMC

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi Book Cover

WHEN

Monday, December 6, 2021
Virtual Event, watch anytime online for one week

TICKETS

Virtual Pass $15
$10 student tickets are available with promo code LS22STUDENT
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Video links will be emailed to all ticket holders on the day of the scheduled lecture. Closed captioning will be available.
Community access tickets are available if cost is a barrier to view this lecture. If you’d like to request a community access ticket please email us at info@pittsburghlectures.org.

WHERE

Online

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