👋 Hello readers!👋 It's the new year! Which means it's time to start reading Transcendent Kingdom. Yaa Gyasi's best-selling novel will be our last 2020 release — one you voted for in our first book club members poll. It follows Gifty, a doctoral candidate at Stanford’s medical school, who is dealing with family tragedy. Her brother, a talented high school athlete, has died from an opioid addiction and her mother is suicidal. Once a committed Christian, Gifty struggles to understand the purpose of human suffering, turning back to the roots of her faith. Get your copy, and read the first chapter here.
Over in the Facebook group, we'll be posting discussion threads throughout the month, following this schedule:
And in case you're wondering, "hey, what about our giveaway?" — fear not! It was delayed because of some end-of-year scheduling hold-ups, but it's here for you today. Knopf is giving away 10 copies with signed bookplates sent separately (US-only, sorry), and Libro.fm is offering 5 free audiobook downloads. I'm listening to the audiobook and absolutely loving it.
Want a shot at one of these great prizes? Respond to this email by Wednesday, January 6, 6 p.m. ET, and tell us about a book that changed the way you view the world. Winners will be selected randomly. Good luck!
Happy reading, Arianna
📚 Behind the Book 📚
We asked Yaa to tell us a bit about how Transcendent Kingdom came to be. Here's what she had to say.  After my first novel, Homegoing, was published, I spent a few months feeling adrift and bereft. “What do I do now?” I kept thinking. Though I had gone to grad school for creative writing and met plenty of other authors, this feeling, the faint sadness of letting a book go, was something I hadn’t heard about or anticipated.
Around this time, my best friend Tina was in the last years of her neuroscience doctoral program and had a paper that was due to be published. She had been so supportive of me and my work that I wanted to do the same for her. I asked her to send me the paper. I sat on my couch, laptop in hand, eager to read. I couldn’t understand a single sentence. Tina had always explained her work to me as being about addiction and depression, but this paper with words like “medial prefrontal cortex” and “nucleus accumbens” went completely over my head. Here was this person who I love, who had been with me through high school Econ classes through unrequited college crushes, who had this career that felt completely opaque to me. So, I asked if I could shadow her in her lab.
The day I went she performed surgery on her mice. She walked me through all the steps and spoke about the larger implications of her work. I loved watching her work, loved seeing her in this new context. As the months went on, and I toiled away at a book that was leading nowhere, I kept thinking about my time in the lab with Tina. Maybe that was where the book was? Before long, I had the first few pages of Transcendent Kingdom.
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