Yaa Gyasi

Was born in Ghana, raised in Alabama, and wrote Homegoing after a trip to Cape Coast Castle where a slave dungeon sits directly beneath a church.

The novel gives one chapter to each generation descending from two half-sisters, one married to a British slaver upstairs and one held below, and follows both lines for three hundred years, through Asante wars, plantations, coal mines in Alabama and the Harlem of the last century.

Transcendent Kingdom is much smaller and harder: a Ghanaian American neuroscientist studying reward circuits in mice, a brother lost to addiction, and a mother who will not get out of bed.