Hi everyone!
Our last book club of 2016 will be reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, with a story based in Ghana.
Here's a Book Summary:
A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three
hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great
American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable
sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the
forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of
a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in
eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and
lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst
to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s
dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming
slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and
grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows
Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante
and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British
colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into
America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the
Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz
clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the
present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with
singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be
inscribed in the soul of a nation.
We'll be meeting at Hotel Rex at 4pm - let's have some drinks to celebrate to 9 years of book club reading!