Yaa Gyasi Boeken

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway award winner, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

With carefully adapted text, new illustrations, language practise activities and additional online resources, the Penguin Readers series introduces language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction. Homegoing, a Level 7 Reader, is B2 in the CEFR framework. The longer text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing future perfect simple, mixed conditionals, past perfect continuous, mixed conditionals, more complex passive forms and modals for deduction in the past. Half-sisters Effia and Esi are born into different villages in Ghana. The sisters' lives follow different paths- Effi marries a wealthy Englishman, while Esi is captured and sold into slavery.

Gifty is the younger child in a family of four who have emigrated from Ghana to the American South. While her gorgeous brother is a sports hero, her father longs to return home and her mother is desperate to hold this family of four together. When Gifty's brother's glorious success on the basketball court falters, addiction strikes and the mother turns inward, and to religion, to find a cure. Each one of the characters tries to find a way to heal the heartbreak- for the mother it is God, for Gifty's father it is escape and for Gifty, our narrator - it is science. But can family love survive when the family itself feels like it is on the edge of disappearing? In her new novel, Yaa Gyasi, by turning her gaze from the historical to the present, has produced an extraordinarily acute and resonant novel about a contemporary family that is as powerful and as moving as her first novel. It confirms her position as one of the country's most brilliant young novelists.