![]() Both feature contemporary characters trying to navigate an inherited history that they don’t always understand. ![]() Reading his work made me feel that I had the permission to do something big and ambitious, and maybe a little messy.ĮSSENCE: I can certainly see that with One Hundred Years of Solitude! Had you read Maryse Condé’s Segu (Penguin) at any point? When I read Homegoing, I thought that the only other novel that attempted to do this kind of thing is Condé’s Segu. Another book I read was One Hundred Years of Solitude (Harper Perennial) by Gabriel García Márquez. Those Victorian novels give you the idea that you can have something with as much depth and breadth as imaginable. Three years later the structure started to materialize and I realized that what I really wanted was to look at a long stretch of time more closely. ![]() I wanted to focus on the first two characters, who are from the eighteenth century, and then on the last two, who are present-day. It opened up my imagination and became the genesis of this story. ![]() A friend visited me and on a whim we went to the Cape Coast Castle. I went to Ghana between my sophomore and junior year. YAA GYASI: I came up with the idea in 2009, when I had a research grant from Stanford University. ![]()
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