Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, December 1, 2018, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Introducing Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi was born in Mapong, Ghana, in 1989. When she was two years old, her family moved to the US so that her father could get his PhD from Ohio State. The family moved several times before settling in Huntsville, Alabama, where Gyasi lived from age 9 through high school graduation. She received a BA from Stanford and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Homegoing is Gyasi's first novel and it received much pre-publication publicity based on the seven-figure advance offer Knopf made to Gyasi. In the video below, Yaa Gyasi talks about Homegoing with PBS Books.

In Ghana

There was indeed a Cape Coast Castle, and it still stands. In the video below, the Obama family takes a tour of the castle.



There was also a Golden Stool of the Asante, and it was indeed the cause of a war between the British. As we learned in the book, the Asante lost that war, but I was delighted to learn that even then, the Asante were allowed to preserve the stool free of interference from the colonial British, which was refreshing given the record of the British on looting precious artifacts. No one has ever sat on the Golden Stool. It rests on a blanket on a chair, and during coronation ceremonies, the new king is held over the stool and not allowed to touch it.

In America

Yaa Gyasi said that when she was doing her research for the book, the one thing that came as a surprise to her was learning about the coal mines of Pratt, Alabama, and about how the convict leasing system was used to provide labor to the mines. The following picture is of one of the plants at the Pratt coal mine. If you look at the raised platform at the lower left of the picture, you can see a mule pulling a tram car with waste rock.

My Brilliant Friend

I just found out that starting this Sunday, November 18, HBO is broadcasting a four-part miniseries of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, which the Readers Roundtable read back in August of 2016. If you get HBO via cable or are subscribed online, check it out.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, November 3, 2018, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York by Francis Spufford

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won’t explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?

Meet the Author

Francis Spufford was born in 1964, the son of a professor of social history and a professor of economics. He received a BA in English Literature from Cambridge in 1985. He was Chief Publisher's Reader from 1987–90 for Chatto & Windus and was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University from 2005 to 2007. Since 2008, he has taught at Goldsmiths College in London on the MA in Creative and Life Writing. He is a practicing Christian, married to an Anglican priest, and is active in the layman's organization of the church.

For most of his writing career, Spufford has been known as a writer of nonfiction. His nonfiction works included:

• I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, 1996.
• The Child That Books Built, 2002.
• Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, 2003.
• Unapologetic, 2012.
• True Stories and Other Essays, 2017.

In 2010, Spufford wrote Red Plenty, a fiction-enhanced historical account of life in the early 1960s Soviet Union, a time when it seemed that communism had triumphed and would really bury capitalism. This fusion of fact and fiction prepared him for writing Golden Hill in 2016, his first complete work of fiction, which was set in colonial New York in the 1740s. Golden Hill won the Costa Book Award for a first novel and also won the Ondaatje Prize.

Further Reading

Linda sent me a link to a blog that is dedicated to all things Golden Hill, including in particular this page that discusses the physical layout of the city of New York in the 1740s when it is set.

To put you in the spirit of the 1700s, here's a video of people dancing the minuet.



And a panel from "A Rakes Progress," by William Hogarth, which may or may not remind you of "Mr. Smith."