![]() ![]() The past is never far behind, even in wide-open California: “I could never shake my ghosts, never, never.” But the future feels limitless having decided that “nothing but blazing brilliance” would be enough to prove her worth, she dreams of running her own Ivy League lab, winning a Nobel Prize, curing addiction and depression and “everything else that ails us.”Īt the heart of the novel is the relationship between Gifty and her aging mother, who - suffering another bout of depression - has come to stay with Gifty. ![]() ![]() “I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption,” she insists. For years, Gifty has kept people at a distance, more attached to lab mice than colleagues and partners. It is a path chosen, in large part, to make sense of the traumas of her childhood back in Alabama: the death of her beloved older brother, Nana, from opioid addiction and the crippling depression of their mother in its wake. A sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University, she is studying the neural circuits of reward-seeking behavior. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.Īt 28, Gifty, the narrator of Yaa Gyasi’s revelatory new novel, “ Transcendent Kingdom,” thinks she’s figured things out. ![]()
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