Yaa Gyasi’s beautiful novel embraces faith that changes and grows

Yaa Gyasi’s sophomore novel explores the many forms faith takes in our lives—faith in God, faith in science, faith in family—and the various ways we engage with it, from blind belief to inquisitive questioning to sorrowful abandonment. Gyasi raises these questions through the story of Gifty, a sixth-year PhD candidate at the Stanford School of Medicine who struggles to know what to do with the evangelical faith of her childhood.

Her life has been marred by tragedy. Her father abandoned the family, her talented basketball-playing brother, Nana, overdosed on heroin in high school, and her formerly strong mother became suicidal and nearly comatose. These losses turn Gifty away from her evangelical upbringing. “It happened that quickly, a tremble-length reckoning. One minute there was a God with the whole world in his hands; the next minute the world was plummeting, ceaselessly, toward an ever-shifting bottom.”

So Gifty looks to science for answers to the misfortune that has befallen her. A neuroscience researcher, she spends most of her time with the mice in her lab, studying their behavior and trying to learn what makes them behave the way they do. However, when her mother comes back into her life, she starts to question her choice of moving away from her faith and finds herself longing for the comfort she once found in God.