Known as a beauty, Effia is intended to be married to the future chief of her village, but when her mother tells her to hide her menstrual cycle, rumours spread that she is barren.
When he returns, Quey is assigned to help to strengthen the ties between his familial village and the British merchants at the Cape Coast Castle.
Growing up with his parents' dysfunctional political marriage, and promised since childhood to the daughter of the Fante chief, Amma, James longs to run away and marry Akosua.
Her childhood best friend, Ohene, promises to marry her after his next successful season and the two renew an affair which coincides with the start of a famine.
She is traumatized to learn that her mother died while being baptized, and by seeing her fellow villagers burn a white traveler alive.
The nightmares continue to haunt Akua and, while sleepwalking during a trance at night, she kills her daughters by setting a fire that consumes them.
The two of them speak Twi together; Esther is unfazed by Yaw's anger and asks him constant questions about his way of life, and he realizes he loves her.
To please Esther he goes to see his mother, now known as the Crazy Woman, for the first time in over forty years in Edweso where they reconcile, and she tells him that there is evil in their line and that she regrets causing the fire that burned him.
Marjorie grows up in Alabama, which she hates, and spends summers in Ghana visiting her grandmother, who has moved from Edweso to the Gold Coast.
She reads a poem about her Ghanaian origin and ancestors during an African American cultural day at her high school, which her father attends.
When H is released from his sentence he settles in Pratt City in Birmingham, Alabama, made up of other ex-convicts both black and white, and works in the coal mine as a free agent.
After her parents die Robert suggests they move away and Willie asks that they go to Harlem as she wants to start a career as a singer.
[4] This effect is first demonstrated by Effia literally living above her half-sister Esi, unaware of the atrocities occurring in the basement of the Cape Coast castle.
In the summer of 2009, following her sophomore year at Stanford University, Gyasi took a trip to Ghana sponsored by a research grant.
[6] On a friend's prompting, they visited the Cape Coast Castle, where she found her inspiration in the contrast between the luxurious upper levels (for colonists and their local families) and the misery of the dungeons below, where slaves were kept.
"[6] Gyasi says the family tree came first, and each chapter, which follows one descendant, is tied to a significant historical event,[5] although she described the research as "wide but shallow.
"[6] The Door of No Return by British historian William St Clair helped to form the descriptions of life in and around the Castle in the first few chapters.
[7][8] One of the final chapters, entitled "Marjorie", is inspired by Gyasi's experiences as part of an immigrant family living in Alabama.
And I think, had I not grown up in Alabama, I don't know that I would have ever written this book.Before the official publication in June 2016, Time's Sarah Begley called it "one of the summer’s most-anticipated novels".
[11][12] The New York Times Book Review listed it as an Editor's Choice, writing, "This wonderful debut by a Ghanaian-American novelist follows the shifting fortunes of the progeny of two half-sisters, unknown to each other, in West Africa and America.
"[15] Anita Felicelli of the San Francisco Chronicle said that Gyasi is "a young writer whose stellar instincts, sturdy craftsmanship and penetrating wisdom seem likely to continue apace — much to our good fortune as readers".
[17] Wilkerson expressed some disappointment: "It is dispiriting to encounter such a worn-out cliché — that African-Americans are hostile to reading and education — in a work of such beauty.
"[17] Steph Cha, writing for the Los Angeles Times, notes "the characters are, by necessity, representatives for entire eras of African and black American history [which] means some of them embody a few shortcuts" in advancing the narrative and themes, but overall, "the sum of Homegoing's parts is remarkable, a panoramic portrait of the slave trade and its reverberations.
"[3] Laura Miller, writing for The New Yorker, said that while parts of Homegoing show "the unmistakable touch of a gifted writer, [the novel] is a specimen of what such a writer can do when she bites off more than she is ready to chew," noting the "form [of the novel] would daunt a far more practiced novelist" as the form, composed of short stories linked by ancestors and descendants, "[isn't] the ideal way to deliver the amount of exposition that historical fiction requires.
"[18] Michiko Kakutani noted in her New York Times review the novel "often feels deliberate and earthbound: The reader is aware, especially in the American chapters, that significant historical events and issues ... have been shoehorned into the narrative, and that characters have been made to trudge through experiences ... meant, in some way, to be representative," but it also "makes us experience the horrors of slavery on an intimate, personal level; by its conclusion, the characters' tales of loss and resilience have acquired an inexorable and cumulative emotional weight.
Jean Zimmerman, also writing for National Public Radio, praised the novel as "a remarkable achievement," saying the "narrative [...] is earnest, well-crafted yet not overly self-conscious, marvelous without being precious.
"[20] Leilani Clark at KQED Arts wrote: "Until every American embarks on a major soul-searching about the venal, sordid racial history of the United States, and their own position in relation to it, the bloodshed, tears, and anger will keep on.
[23] In 2024 the book was banned in Texas by the Katy Independent School District on the basis that the novel is "adopting, supporting, or promoting gender fluidity"[24] despite also pronouncing a bullying policy that protects infringements on the rights of the student.
[26][27] Homegoing was shortlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize,[28] which eventually went to The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter by Kia Corthron.
[29][30] In February 2017, Swansea University announced Homegoing had made the longlist for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize for the best published literary work in the English language written by an author aged 39 or younger.