Picture a globe glowing with places of particular misery, pain or evil: Auschwitz, Nanking, Hiroshima, Wounded Knee. Burning white hot would be a singular landmark in west Africa: Cape Coast Castle, a ...

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” wrote James Joyce in Ulysses. Yaa Gyasi, a writer with a rich talent for visceral story-telling, is part of the wake-up crew. Ancestral curses ...

If you’ve been paying any attention to pop culture, you’ve probably noticed an uptick in slavery narratives, particularly in Hollywood. The most recent is the History channel’s remake of “Roots,” the ...

After two half sisters are separated, we follow their family lines over the course of two centuries through a series of short stories. Some of their descendants are in Africa, some are in America; ...

Told in two parts, Yaa Gyasi’s impressive debut novel opens in 18th-century Ghana and travels between the lineages of two half-sisters, Effia and Esi. The 26-year-old Gyasi — who was born in Ghana but ...

The story of one of the summer’s most-anticipated novels begins with a trip to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle—a symbol in stone of slavery and the walls built to ignore it. Yaa Gyasi was a college ...

Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, explores themes of belief, loss, doubt, love, and mice. The protagonist, Gifty, comes from a Ghanaian family living in Alabama that has been cut in half ...

Towards the end of Yaa Gyasi’s tremendous family saga “Homegoing,” a Ghanaian teacher with revolutionary aspirations lectures his students on a problem of history: We need to rely on others’ words to ...