In the Sunday School room at her church, Gifty overhears two women talking about her brother Nana, a gifted basketball player who has transformed the local team. There are occasions of racism throughout the novel and Gifty's childhood. The Chin Chin Man's absence from his family reverberates throughout the story and leaves Gifty's mother a single, working parent in a foreign country. In America, he is accused of stealing in Walmart 'three times in four months…Homesick, humiliated, he stopped leaving the house.' Eventually, he returns to Ghana, where he feels free to be a strong, proud, Black man. While her father is never keen on moving to America, he quickly follows his wife and young son, but longs for Ghana. Her mother wants to give her new baby everything and decides moving to America is the way to do so, a decision Gifty eventually questions: 'this place was everything mother hoped for that day when she asked God where she should go to give her son the world.' Her parents are married in Ghana, and her older brother, Nana, is born there. In journaling to God, Gifty refers to her as The Black Mamba. However, Gifty's mother's name is never mentioned.

Gifty's father is only ever referred to as the Chin Chin Man, a name he earned for the deep-fried snacks made of flour, sugar, milk, and butter that he convinced Gifty's Ghanian grandmother to give him for free. Her story begins before she was born, when her mother and father meet in Ghana. Instead, they are more thoughtfully given to readers to keep us wanting more. The scenes from her past are not in chronological order. Stories from Gifty's past are interspersed with moments from the present day.

Gifty, the narrator, is conducting research on mice as a PhD candidate in neuroscience while also tending to and worrying about her depressed mother who rarely gets out of bed. In Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi writes of pain and loss so vividly the reader feels it, as if they are actually experiencing it themselves.

Transcendent kingdom review