In this sweeping family saga that begins in 18th-century Ghana, two half sisters and their families lead drastically different lives: one marries well, and the other is sold into slavery. An ambitious lyrical debut about the ramifications of slavery and our entangled histories. (http://ow.ly/ysyd305MyZt)-Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora. Gyasi's debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the "castle" he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what's held there, she's told "cargo.") The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped "until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby"; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband's injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel's 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: "I will be my own nation," one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it. A promising debut that's awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Gyasi's amazing debut offers an unforgettable, page-turning look at the histories of Ghana and America, as the author traces a single bloodline across seven generations, beginning with Ghanaian half-sisters Effia, who is married off to a British colonizer in the 1760s, and Esi, who is captured into the British slave-trading system around the same time. These women never meet, never know of each other's existence, yet in alternating narratives we see their respective families swell through the eyes of slaves, wanderers, union leaders, teachers, heroin addicts, and more-these often feel like linked short stories, with each descendent receiving his or her own chapter. Esi's descendants find themselves on the other side of the Atlantic, toiling on plantations in the American South before escaping to the North for freedom, while Effia's offspring become intertwined in the Gold Coast slave trade, until her grandson breaks away and disappears to live a simple existence with his true love. In both America and Ghana, prosperity rises and falls from parent to child, love comes and goes, and the characters' trust of white men wavers. These story elements purposely echo like ghosts-as history often repeats itself-yet Gyasi writes each narrative with remarkable freshness and subtlety. A marvelous novel. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME Entertainment. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

BLACK HOLE BLUES: And Other Songs From Outer Space, byJanna Levin. (Anchor, $16.) Levin tells the story of gravitational waves - "ripples" in the fabric of space-time first theorized by Einstein - and the scientists who built a machine to detect them nearly 100 years later. The collision of two black holes in 2015 allowed researchers to record the first sounds from space, concluding a 50-year experiment. MY STRUGGLE, BOOK 5: Some Rain Must Fall, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) In my struggle 14 years that this volume karl ove spans, the one constant is Knausgaard's drive for literary success; the book, the penultimate installment of his autobiographical work, follows him from age 19 through the end of his first marriage, and sees him enter a prestigious writing program and secure a book deal. IN PRAISE OF FORGETTING: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, by David Rieff. (Yale University, $16.) Rieff, who as a journalist witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Bosnian war, outlines a humane case against memorializing tragedies. Rather than helping people to heal, he argues, collective memories can often stoke generational hatred; common defenses of public memorials, such as the hope of preventing future atrocities, are naive. RAZOR GIRL, by Carl Hiaasen. (Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard, $15.95.) A cast of comic, only-in-Florida characters carry out this novel's elaborate farce: Lane, a Hollywood agent kidnapped in error after a fender-bender; his client, the star of a lowbrow reality show; and the woman of the title, who takes Lane hostage. Hiaasen's prose helps to keep "everything at the right temperature," our reviewer, Terrence Rafferty, wrote. "In Florida, you have to know how to stay cool." DIMESTORE: A Writer's Life, by Lee Smith. (Algonquin, $15.95.) This collection of autobiographical essays sketches out the Appalachian coal-mining town in Virginia where Smith grew up - before Walmart arrived, her father's store was demolished or country became cool. One thing about the South that will never change? "We Southerners love a story," Smith writes, "and we will tell you anything." HOMEGOING, by Yaa Gyasi. (Vintage, $16.) Starting in 18th-century Ghana, the lineages of two half sisters - one married to a white man and living in comfort, the other sold into slavery - unfold in Africa and the United States. Our reviewer, Isabel Wilkerson, said the novel offers what "enslavement denied its descendants: the possibility of imagining the connection between the broken threads of their origins."

This sometimes painful novel by Ghanaian author Gyasi has garnered much prepublication attention, including a blurb by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It traces, through the stories of two main families in alternating chapters proceeding chronologically, the history of Ghanaian and American civilization from the eighteenth century to the present, in Africa (where one branch of the family initially stays) and America (where the other goes). It opens with the horrors wrought by British enslavement of the Africans, especially the women, and goes through each stage efficiently. The author has done her research, and though the book occasionally reads like a historical overview (each element the beginning of cocoa cultivation in Ghana, the Fugitive Slave Act, and, later, the convict-lease system in America feels summarized rather than dealt with dramatically), it has power and beauty, thanks to Gyasi's commanding style. Expect the novel to attract considerable attention and to appeal to readers of multigenerational sagas.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2016 Booklist

Two hundred fifty years ago in what is modern-day Ghana, two half-sisters are each given a special stone by their mother. Effia marries an Englishman and lives in the ignominiously named Castle, the center of the African Gold Coast slavery trade. Esi is temporarily imprisoned in the Castle's hellish dungeon before she is shipped to the other side of the world. Effia's stone passes through her line-including a privileged son, a murdered mother, and a survivor of fire-and travels to the American South two centuries later. Esi's stone remains buried in Africa, much like her desperate soul, as descendants are enslaved first by laws, then by heinous circumstances torturing the African American community, from unjust imprisonment to Jim Crow to drug addiction. Two present-day members of the family will eventually meet in San Francisco and, unaware of their shared past, restore the family's torn fabric. -VERDICT Homegoing's early hype proves well deserved; enhancing Gyasi's magnificent epic, narrator Dominic Hoffman shines across continents, oceans, and generations and makes this a must-have for all collections. ["This is an amazing first novel, remarkable in its epic vision": LJ 6/1/16 starred review of the Knopf hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.