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Yaa Gyasi, author of Transcendent Kingdom

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.

Week of July 5, 2021

Paperback releases for the week of July 5th include MIGRATIONS, Charlotte McConaghy's ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds; ANXIOUS PEOPLE by Fredrik Backman, a charming, poignant novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find that they have more in common than they ever imagined; Christina Baker Kline's THE EXILES, an ambitious, emotionally resonant work of historical fiction that captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women’s lives --- two English convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl --- in 19th-century Australia; and YALE NEEDS WOMEN, Anne Gardiner Perkins' unflinching account of how a group of young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future.