Published by Penguin, 2016, 305 pages.

Effia and Esi, two Asante women, born in Ghana—then known as the Gold Coast—are half-sisters but unaware of each other’s existence. They go on to lead very different lives, and the paths they take affect the generations that follow.

The book begins in the late 18th century. The British had taken over some of the coastal areas of Ghana and were trading with the local people—a trade that included slaves. They had built the Cape Coast Castle, not only to house the British, but also to keep the slaves before they were shipped across the Atlantic.

The story follows the families of the two half-sisters. Effia is known as the child born of the fire: the night she is born, a great fire tears through the forest surrounding her village. When she grows up, she is married to James Collins, the British governor of the Castle. He has a wife in England but, like many Englishmen in Ghana, takes a Ghanaian wife.

Esi, who is born in another village, is the daughter of a Big Man. There are frequent tribal wars, and the victors bring back not only precious goods from the defeated villages but also its people, some of whom go on to become house slaves for the villagers. The rest are sent off to the Castle. After winning one of these wars, Esi’s father brings back a young girl, Abronoma, to work as a maid for his family. Abronoma manages to persuade Esi to get a message to her father. He comes back to claim her, and the resulting battle turns the tables. Soon, at 15, Esi is imprisoned in the Castle’s dungeon, waiting to be sent to America.

The description of the dungeon is harrowing. “The mud walls of the dungeon made all time equal. There was no sunlight. Darkness was day and night and everything in between. Sometimes there were so many bodies stacked into the women’s dungeon that they all had to lie, stomach down, so that women could be stacked on top of them.”

The book follows the descendants of Effia and Esi from 1775 to the 1990s with the two families living very different lives. Through them, Yaa Gyasi gives us a history of Ghana and the US, the slave trade that connected them, and the way the countries developed over time. The Ghanaian family see the departure of the British and the independence of their country. In the US, Esi’s family lives through slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and the Jazz Age in Harlem.

You meet Quey, Effia’s son, who is sent to Effia’s village to negotiate trade agreements (including slaves) with his uncle on behalf of the British. Quey’s son James turns his back on the slave trade and chooses a simpler life. Two generations later, the fire that had torn through the forest when Effia was born and which was started by her mother, comes back to haunt Akua, James’s granddaughter.

In the US, Esi’s daughter Ness is sold, and she never sees her mother again. When she was a child, Esi—who was known never to tell a happy story—would tell Ness about the “Big Boat”. “Ness would fall asleep to the images of men being thrown into the Atlantic Ocean like anchors attached to nothing: no land, no people, no worth.” Ness tries to escape the plantation with her family; only her son Kojo manages to make it out. His granddaughter Willie moves to Harlem with her family, and her son becomes involved in the civil rights movement.

The chapters move between the two families, generation after generation. Each chapter tells the story of one of the family, starting with Effie and Esi and ending with Effie’s descendant Marjorie and Esi’s descendant Marcus, who bring the story full circle.

I like the way the novel is structured. Moving the story between the two families, in a sense, intertwines them. In spite of the different protagonists in each chapter, the structure does not feel disjointed but sweeps you along, and you care about what happens to the characters. You get a sense of the passage of time and a realization of how a single event can change not only a life but also the lives that come after.

Homegoing—Gyasi’s debut novel—is powerful and heart-rending. I look forward to reading more of her work.