回家之路 – Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

十八世纪的加纳，一对同母异父的姐妹分别生活在两个不同的村庄，不知道彼 此的存在。一个嫁给了一名英国士兵，在海岸角城堡舒适体面的小屋中安度余生；一个在村庄遭袭中被俘，被囚于同一座城堡，沦为黑奴，后被贩卖至大洋彼岸。

穿越八个世代，《回家之路》追随两个女孩及其后人的人生之路，呈现了一段宏大而不失细节的黑人家族历史——从黄金海岸，到密西西比州棉花种植园；从美国独立战争，到爵士时代——写尽历史动荡和世事沧桑给普通人带来的离散之困。

一颗种子裂成两瓣，在两片大陆成为彼此的镜像，而隔在中间的，是时而沉默、时而波浪浮动的大海。

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.

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