The world is unearthly. Yaa Gyashi

The New York Times about science and faith, love and addiction. The new novel of the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Granta Prize, the finalist of Women’s Prize. One of the most anticipated new products is 2021 according to Forbes.

Gift, the daughter of migrants from Ghana. Her family flew to America, but still a girl feels a stranger, lost between the two countries, religion and science.

The girl studies in the sixth year of the Faculty of Neurology in Stanford, where she studies the neural chains of behavior associated with thirst rewards, and depression and conducts experiments on mice. Scientific experiments for gifts (she tries to wean mice from self -destructive actions in a desire for pleasure) is a way to figure out what is happening in her own family: to save her brother from addiction, to save the mother from depression.

several years ago Gifi’s brother, gifted athlete, died of an overdose of heroin, his father returned to Ganu, and his mother has not been able to overcome clinical depression for many years (she hopes to be healed by prayers).

Turning to science, Gifts stubbornly continues to look for answers In the bosom of the church, raising it. The salvation that the Church promises is angry to the girl and causes a feeling of hopelessness. Suscitating in science in one of the best universities in the world, Gifts recalls the family in which she grew up: in their relationship there always lacked warmth, but there were four of them, and only two were left. At the age of 28, Gifts acutely feels loneliness, keeps a diary in which he talks about the family under fictional names and keeps conversations with God. She finds a friend - a colleague in Katherine’s laboratory, and a young man Khan, with whom it is easier to carry the baggage of the past.

for whom this book:

for readers of intellectual prose.

for everyone who loves novels with a strong heroine in the center of the plot.

from the translator:

“The world of unearthly " - the story of a girl who is experiencing a crisis in the family and, having no other support, leaves headlong into science, trying to with her help to find the answer to the question: what makes a person the unfortunate? Suddenly, you can derive a formula, isolate the decisive factor and save people from depression or pernicious dependence? Or just justify to itself, why life in a seemingly prosperous family could go awry.

the author seems to be dissecting feelings and puts his heroes in difficult situations, understanding their behavior, like the heroine herself, Gifts, watches her own experimental mice in the laboratory.

This is a book about the evolution of faith. The unconditional children's faith in the miracle begins to undermine reality, where prayer does not always bring salvation, and there is no answer to the question asked, but deep down there is a longing for that previous confidence: someone is looking after you and will surely save you at the right time. The book about dissolving herself in someone else's life, where the mother’s fanatical love turns into a catastrophe for herself, where the daughter is so involved in the existence of her mother that she forgets about her own. The book on understanding and accepting - yourself, your place in life surrounding with their mistakes and wrong decisions. ”

Elena Musicantov, translator, for Forbes Online.