Yaa Gyasi’s emotionally powerful Homegoing continues to resound a little more than a year after its publication, earning a place among the five finalists for PEN America’s 2017 Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The sweeping novel depicts 300 years of suffering begotten by slavery, tracing seven generations of descendants from two half-sisters in Ghana whose lives diverged in the mid-18^th century. One was captured and sold as slave. The other married a British officer.

The 27-year-old Gyasi – born in Ghana, raised in Alabama, and educated at Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop – discusses the book, its origins, and her intended takeaway. “The moments that we are dealing with in the present didn’t just appear out of nowhere,” she says.