A Quest to Understand Suffering in Yaa Gyasi’s Novel ‘Transcendent Kingdom’

Following her critically-acclaimed debut novel "Homegoing,"
novelist Yaa Gyasi returns with “Transcendent Kingdom.” The story
follows Gifty, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at Stanford
University. After losing her brother to a heroin overdose and while
caring for her suicidal mother, she is determined to find a
scientific reason for suffering. But even as Gifty embarks on her
scientific quest, she finds herself longing for the faith of her
childhood to help reckon with her family’s pain. Like Gyasi, the
character Gifty comes from an immigrant family from Ghana and grew
up in an evangelical household in Alabama. We'll talk to Gyasi, who
spent time in California as an undergraduate at Stanford, about the
book and the desire to understand human pain and suffering.