The Ghanaian novel every Stanford freshman is reading

pulse-ghana admin

July 7, 2017 12:23 PM

Yaa Gyasi's resonating debut novel reconnecting African and American history is a mandatory read for incoming Stanford students.

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The Ghanaian debut novel that has risen to critical acclaim since its publication, 'Homecoming', is now a requisite reading material for all Stanford first-year students.

The author of the novel that won the National Book Critic’s prize for 'Best Debut Novel', Yaa Gyasi recounts the agony and seeming bliss of the counter-perspectives of two victims of slavery and their extended progeny.

The novel that is speculated to have earned Gyasi a seven-figure worth of fortune started while she was just a sophomore at her alma mater, Stanford University.

For the first time, since her early childhood, she was coming back home to her motherland as part a research that went awry. The author recalls she thought she had completely wasted her time and that of her compatriots, together with the funds of the school until she was salvage by a friend’s visit that would inspire the most talked about novel in America.

‘Homecoming’ dabbles between the interplay of the lives of two sisters in the Cape Coast Castle, one of which is married to a British officer in somewhat comfort, and the other struggling to survive in the plantations of Ghana.

The story continues with the separate lives of the descendants of the sisters in Ghana and in America has resolutions post-slavery.

At the 2017 PEN America Literary Awards, the book was nominated for the Debut Fiction Prize. It also won The New York Times Notable Book of the Year and made the list of Best Young American Novelists by Granta.

The author was also exposed to millions of viewers of the Daily Show hosted by Trevor Noah to discuss the book.

The mandatory reading of the book is as part of Stanford’s 'Three Books' an initiative to orients new students into the challenging thinking patterns of the university community and also give them a platform to deliberate the pertinent issues of their generation in a round table discussion with the authors.

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