Digital Audio
English language
Published June 7, 2016 by Books on Tape.
The unforgettable New York Times best seller begins with the story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a British slaver. Written with tremendous sweep and power, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history, each life indeliably drawn, as the legacy of slavery is fully revealed in light of the present day.
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 …
The unforgettable New York Times best seller begins with the story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a British slaver. Written with tremendous sweep and power, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history, each life indeliably drawn, as the legacy of slavery is fully revealed in light of the present day.
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. Source: www.booksontape.com/book/533857/homegoing/
I honestly didn't know what I was grabbing when I snagged this from the shelf at the library. It's not exactly a novel, and not exactly a short story collection, but vignettes, small slices of life from a single family over hundreds of years. Either way, it was well written, and I would have enjoyed even deeper looks into their lives.
This is less a novel and more a collection of connected short stories. I recently read "Barkskins" by Annie Proulx, which is very similar insofar as it follows multiple characters down through generations, and I have many of the same criticisms. Being introduced to so many characters, many who we follow for fewer than 30 pages, makes it tough to care about any of them as individuals. Both books detail the way that injustice is carried down through generations. But "Homegoing" provides an interesting contextualization of a history that I've only read about in a dry, non-fictional context, and the book helps to make it feel much more real and immediate.
