Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi's epic debut begins with the stories of two half-sisters in Ghana, or the Gold Coast as it was then, in the 1700s, one married off to a white British officer, the other enslaved and shipped to America. The structure of this novel almost makes it read like a collection of short stories, with chapters moving swiftly forward through the generations of the branching family and alternating between the two separate family lines. Gyasi's writing is incredible and so evocative that it's often difficult to read. That aside, this is a must-read for the year and I can't recommend it highly enough.