Banned Book Club: "Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing traces two branches of a family across generations, exploring slavery, colonialism & the enduring legacy of history. The Banned Book Club is led by Bryn, dedicated to reading and protecting the most important and threatened books for our generation. This month, we’re reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi — a sweeping, multigenerational novel that traces the enduring legacy of slavery, colonialism, and racial injustice across three centuries and two continents. Beginning in eighteenth-century Ghana, the novel follows two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, whose lives take dramatically different paths: one marries a British slave trader, while the other is imprisoned beneath the very castle where her sister lives before being sold into slavery. Through the stories of their descendants, Gyasi explores how history shapes families, identities, and futures in ways both visible and unseen. Published in 2016, Homegoing has faced challenges and restrictions in American schools over its depictions of slavery, sexual violence, racism, and other difficult historical realities. Yet these subjects are essential to the novel's examination of the lasting consequences of the transatlantic slave trade and systemic oppression. By bringing generations of interconnected lives into focus, Gyasi challenges the ways history is often simplified, sanitized, or erased. The novel raises urgent questions about whose stories are told, whose suffering is acknowledged, and what is lost when uncomfortable truths are excluded from classrooms and libraries. Lyrical, ambitious, and deeply moving, Homegoing is a powerful exploration of inheritance, identity, and the long reach of history. It reminds us that the past is never entirely past, and that understanding where we come from requires confronting the stories others might prefer to leave untold. We will meet in person in the loft at our store at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $21, which includes a copy of Homegoing to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting. YAA GYASI was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her debut novel, Homegoing, received the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics Circle/John Leonard Award. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn. ABOUT BOOK BANS: Books are under profound attack in the United States. PEN America's latest report, Banned in the USA: The Normalization of Book Banning, found that 6,870 books bans were enacted during the 2024-25 school year, across 23 states and 87 public school districts. And everywhere, it is the books that have long fought for a place on the shelf that are being targeted. Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history. PEN America pushes back against censorship and the intolerance and exclusion that undergird it. Check out some frequently asked questions about book banning: https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questions/