Banned Book Club: “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi

Two half-sisters born in separate villages on the 18th-century Gold Coast, now Ghana, set "Homegoing" in motion. One marries a British officer and lives in comfort at Cape Coast Castle, while the other is held in its dungeons and shipped to America. Yaa Gyasi's 2016 debut follows their descendants one generation per chapter. The story moves through Gold Coast wars on one side of the Atlantic and through plantations, Alabama coal mines, Harlem jazz clubs and a present-day university campus on the other. The novel won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. It is the current selection of the Banned Book Club at downtown Bookstore1Sarasota.