Dear Librarians,

I cant remember how old I was when my father took me to get a library card,
but I remember how my whole body felt charged with excitement. My fingers tingled
as I picked out the huge stack of books to take home with me that day. My library card
came with a sense of freedom, of adventure, not unlike that which many young
people feel when getting a drivers license. With the card, as with a car, I could go
anywhere, do anything.
I had long been a lover of books, a voracious, ravenous reader, but I had also
grown up with parents who were forever on the strictest of budgets. Buying books
was out of the question, but no one ever turned down a trip to the library. To see my
name on the card, to not have to ask my parents to get a book for me, it was, perhaps,
the first time in my life I felt in full control.
The librarian went over the rules of library card ownership with me. She looked
at my large stack of books and said, Now remember, if you cant finish these in two
weeks, you have to come back and re-check them. My first thought was, Who would
need two weeks to read a book? Im older now. The speed at which I read has
slowed, but my love for libraries has marched steadily on.
Long Live the Libraries,
Yaa Gyasi

HOMEGOINGwith breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three

hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American
novel.
PRAISE FOR HOMEGOING:
Gyasis characters are so fully realized, so elegantly carvedvery often I found myself longing to
hear more. Craft is essential given the task Gyasi sets for herselfdrawing not just a lineage of
two sisters, but two related peoples. Gyasi is deeply concerned with the sin of selling humans on
Africans, not Europeans. But she does not scold. She does not excuse. And she does not
romanticize. The black Americans she follows are not overly virtuous victims. Sin comes in all
forms, from selling people to abandoning children. I think I needed to read a book like this to
remember what is possible. I think I needed to remember what happens when you pair a gifted
literary mind to an epic task. Homegoing is an inspiration.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me
Homegoing is a remarkable feata novel at once epic and intimate, capturing the moral weight
of history as it bears down on individual struggles, hopes, and fears. A tremendous debut.
Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment
I could not put this book down
Roxane Gay
It is hard to overstate how much I LOVE this book
Michele Norris
The hypnotic debut novel by Yaa Gyasi, a stirringly gifted writermagicalthe great, aching gift
of the novel is that it offers, in its own way, the very thing that enslavement denied its
descendants: the possibility of imagining the connection between the broken threads of their
origins.
Isabel Wilkerson, The New York Times Book Review

978-0-385-68613-6 | $26.95 | 150,000 | HC | June 2016

E: 978-0-735-20981-7