On the Same Page: Soul-Searching Stories about Home, Heritage, and History
PUBLISHED August 20th, 2021 06:00 am | UPDATED August 31st, 2021 11:09 am
What is Home, truly? Is it a room with four walls you return to every night? Or is it people, a community that you feel tethered to no matter what physical space you occupy? This August’s curation of novels digs deep into heart-wrenching tales about home, heritage, and history with books that span across not only nations but generations.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Covering 300 years from eighteenth-century Ghana to twentieth-century Harlem, Homegoing follows two half-sisters and their subsequent offspring through 12 different point of views. A monumental portrait of history and its effects upon families, Gyasi’s debut novel is so earth-shatteringly immersive that you’ll wish you could spend more chapters with the characters of her creation.
The novel begins with two half-sisters – Effia and Esi – being born into vastly different social circumstances. Married off to an Englishmen to live a comfortable life in Cape Coast Castle, Effia is unaware of her sister Esi’s imprisonment beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, cramped into a tiny cell and waiting to be sold with thousands into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade. The story then branches off into generations of narratives stemming from the two sisters’ bloodlines. From slavery, colonisation, to police brutality, this novel is most definitely not an easy read, but truly deserves the time of every contemporary human being.
Homegoing is available on Book Depository.
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
What do tradition, heritage, and identity mean for a family held together and defined by their diaspora? Endowing striking insight and overflowing with tremendous empathy, Jhumpa Lahiri’s award-winning novel paints a heart-wrenching picture of the tumultuous immigrant experience of a family who uproots themselves to pursue a life wildly different from their last.
From a tradition-bound life in Calcutta to a foreign America, recently-wed Ashoke and Ashmina Ganguli immigrate from India to the west so Ashoke can take a job as a professor in a United States university. Their eldest child Gogol struggles with assimilating into American culture and his growing disdain for his namesake. In comparison, his parents yearn to create a life in America that includes interweaving aspects of both home and this foreign space. Hard-hitting and beautifully written, this novel serves as a needed glimpse of the Indian immigrant experience in the U.S.
The Namesake is available on Book Depository.
Educated by Tara Westover
The middle of our list marks Tara’s Westover non-fiction memoir detailing her struggle with self-invention. Educated is an account of Westover’s isolated childhood with a Mormon survivalist family and how her quest for knowledge took her from the mountains of Idaho to Harvard and Cambridge.
The complications in familial relationships and a competing need to develop a sense of self shine through strongest in this memoir. Tender but emotionally devastating at times, Westover weaves a story of her past wrought with heavy emotion and enlightening self-discovery. Littered with traumatic incidents, this memoir is not for the faint-of-heart so we do suggest looking up the content warnings before diving in.
Educated is available on Book Depository.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
This is a story about love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. Chronicling the lives of various characters through several decades, Pachinko is a bestselling historical fiction novel that follows the life of Sunja and the tales of her loved ones. A sprawling dramatic saga that lasts through wars and cleaving of a nation, this hefty novel is as much about the unrelenting nature of history as it is about the strength and complexities of familial ties.
Set in the early 1900s, Sunja falls for a wealthy travelling stranger in her hometown who gets her pregnant. After discovering that he already has a wife in Japan, she cuts her ties with her lover and accepts an offer of marriage from a sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. As she leaves her mother and her quaint seaside home, Sunja tumbles through a life of wartime hardships, immigration, and a deep yearning for a home that has changed through the years.
Pachinko is available on Book Depository.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
We’ve come full circle in this edition of On the Same Page with another multi-generational novel. Joint winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2019, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of 12 mostly women, black, and British characters as they navigate through contemporary Britain.
This larger-than-life novel is profoundly moving. The sometimes-comical vibrancy of every character does not overshadow the painfully human struggles they go through. With characters from all sorts of ages, sexualities, and social classes, Evaristo manages to cover a sprawling set of topics through her ambitious exploration of these multifaceted women. A polyphonic love song of black womanhood not to be missed.
Girl, Woman, Other is available on Book Depository.
Top Image: Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash
