One Book, One Wallingford 2022: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Wallingford CT

20 January, 2022

5:45 PM

Description

The Wallingford Public Library is pleased to announce that the 2022 One Book, One Wallingford selection is Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. Transcendent Kingdom is narrated by Gifty, a 28-year-old PhD candidate at Stanford University who studies reward-seeking behavior in mice by addicting them to an energy drink and then placing them in a testing chamber fitted with a lever that administers randomly either the drink or an electric shock. But Gifty's obsessive focus on her research has been diverted because her mother has come to stay, having had a relapse of the severe depression that she has struggled with since the death of Gifty's beloved older brother. This visit disrupts Gifty's carefully calibrated world, forcing her to confront the traumatic memories she has been trying to avoid. Religion has been her mother's source of comfort, but Gifty has turned her back on it, nudged towards atheism by science, and towards science by her high school biology teacher's belief that Homo sapiens is "the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom." Longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and shortlisted for 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction, The Washington Post named Transcendent Kingdom "a book of blazing brilliance." Gyasi's depiction of Gifty's struggle for connection in a place where science and faith are at odds is an achingly beautiful story of love, loss and forgiveness. Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist. Raised in Huntsville, Alabama, Gyasi received a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a National Book Foundation "5 under 35 honoree. Her debut novel Homegoing won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. It also won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, an American Book Award, and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. Wallingford Public Library's Reader's Advisory Librarian Cindy Haiken will be at the forefront of the many book discussions about Transcendent Kingdom that will take place in and around Wallingford. "I am absolutely thrilled that the residents of Wallingford will be reading and discussing Yaa Gyasi's brilliant novel Transcendent Kingdom and will have the opportunity to meet Gyasi in April," says Haiken. "One of my favorite reads of 2020, it is a powerful and tightly-written novel about family love, loss, belonging and belief that I personally believe is even better than Gyasi's striking and bestselling debut novel Homegoing. Gyasi's characters are deeply human, with real hurt and real memories. The painful details of Gifty's past are key to our understanding of her present, and the novel is filled with the tension between our desire to understand and the realization that some aspects of human behavior cannot be comprehended using science alone. Thought-provoking and filled with complex themes that reverberate deeply, Transcendent Kingdom is a magnificent novel. I cannot wait to talk about it with as many people as I possibly can!" Transcendent Kingdom is also the 2022 All CT Reads adult title. A program of the CT State Library, All CT Reads is a year-long initiative to promote lifelong reading, learning, and connection that uses a rotating community committee structure to select three main book titles and 3 shortlist book titles, each calendar year for three age groups: children (ages 8-12), teens (ages 13-18), and adults. In addition to the books, All CT Reads provides a supported programmatic structure built around the titles with room for individuality and creativity. The goal of One Book, One Wallingford is to bring the community together in reading and discussing the same book. This annual celebration features lectures, public programs, and book discussions throughout the months of February and March and will culminate in a visit from the author on April 4, 2022. A full list of events can be found here. This celebration is possible thanks to our partners: Choate Rosemary Hall, Coalition for a Better Wallingford, Literacy Volunteers of Greater New Haven, Wallingford Poet Laureate Debora Kuan, Spanish Community of Wallingford, Wallingford Performing Arts Center, Wallingford Public Schools, Wallingford Senior Center, and Wallingford Youth and Social Services.