Transcendent Kingdom – A Book Club Led by the Hotchkiss School’s Carita Gardiner
Wednesday, July 28th through August 18th at 7 pm , Noble Horizons will host The Hotchkiss School’s Carita Gardiner who will lead a book club discussion of Yaa Gyasi’s novel, Transcendent Kingdom.
Yaa Gyasi’s stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.
“A book of blazing brilliance … of profound scientific and spiritual reflection that recalls the works of Richard Powers and Marilynne Robinson… A double helix of wisdom and rage twists through the quiet lines…Thank God, we have this remarkable novel.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Gyasi sometimes reminds me of other writers who’ve addressed the immigrant experience in America—Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li in particular…. As in the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or the Ghanaian-American short-story writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, the African immigrants in this novel exist at a certain remove from American racism, victims but also outsiders, marveling at the peculiar blindnesses of the locals…brilliant… Transcendent Kingdom trades the blazing brilliance of Homegoing for another type of glory, more granular and difficult to name.”
—Nell Freudenberger, The New York Times Book Review
“The novel is full of brilliantly revealing moments, sometimes funny, often poignant…. [Gifty is] provokingly vital.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
“Yaa Gyasi’s profoundly moving second novel takes place in the vast, fragile landscape where the mysteries of God and the certainties of science collide. Through deliberate and precise prose, the book becomes an expansive meditation on grief, religion, and family.”
—The Boston Globe
“Laser-like… A powerful, wholly unsentimental novel about family love, loss, belonging and belief that is more focused but just as daring as its predecessor, and to my mind even more successful… [Transcendent Kingdom] is burningly dedicated to the question of meaning… The pressure created gives her novel a hard, beautiful, diamantine luster.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
Carita Gardiner, a former Chair of the Hotchkiss School English Department, holds a B.A., from Amherst College, an M.Ed. from Harvard University, and an M.A. from Middlebury College. Please register for a Zoom link below.
Cancellation:
Occasionally, events may be cancelled due to inclement weather or other conditions beyond our control. In that case, we will make every effort to update our website and contact registrants.
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