Review: Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing pulls off a history of slavery from two sides of the Atlantic

In a much-discussed 2014 Atlantic cover story, Ta-Nehisi Coates made a "Case for Reparations," in which he argued the United States must reckon with not only its legacy of slavery, but its long post-abolition history of discrimination. Coates wrote a blurb for Yaa Gyasi's debut novel, a double-barrelled family saga set in Ghana and the United States, but that's not the only reason his name comes to mind. Homegoing, the American sections at least, could be read as a fictional analogue to Coates's essay, though the novel is also much more than that. The story of two half-sisters and their descendants, Homegoing is also a history of slavery from two sides of the Atlantic, spanning four centuries – ambitious, but Gyasi pulls it off. In the epigraph, an Akan proverb compares a family to a forest: "If you are inside you see that each tree has its own position." Gyasi's characters are well-drawn, individual people, not types – that's what makes this such a powerful debut.