Quote by Yaa Gyasi: “The past is not the past. It is the present.”

We like to think of history as something that happened and ended. But the effects of what came before — slavery, colonialism, inherited wealth or poverty, family trauma — live inside the present. Understanding this is the beginning of understanding why things are the way they are now, and what it will actually take to change them.

Homegoing was published in 2016, the year Black Lives Matter became a global movement following a series of high-profile police killings of Black Americans. The novel's argument — that the violence and inequality of the present are the direct consequences of the slave trade — felt immediately urgent to its readers.

Ghanaian-American novelist whose debut novel Homegoing (2016) traced the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade across eight generations of two Ghanaian family lines. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award, making her one of the most celebrated debut novelists of the decade.