HOMEGOING

By Yaa Gyasi

Knopf, 305 pp., $36.95

Yaa Gyasi’s highly anticipated debut novel “Homegoing’’ begins with a birth and a fire. As Cobbe Otcher’s daughter Effia enters the world on Africa’s Gold Coast in the middle of the 18th century, a fire rages nearby, destroying a significant chunk of Cobbe’s property and the surrounding landscape. This moment of coeval possibility and loss sets the tone for Gyasi’s compelling family saga, which narrates over 250 years of African and American history through Effia and Esi, two half sisters who don’t know about each other, and their descendants. If at first the simultaneous birth and fire seem coincidental, they are soon revealed to be deeply connected, furthering the novel’s interwoven themes of freedom, slavery, responsibility, blame, history, family, and love.

Predicting bestsellers is risky business, but it will be a shock if “Homegoing’’ doesn’t climb the summer charts. The novel brings together current literary vogues for historical fiction and African authors (Gyasi was born in Ghana, though she grew up in Alabama), provides deep background for today’s controversies over racial justice, arrives with a passionate blurb from National Book Award-winner Ta-Nehisi Coates, and is highly readable. In other words, “Homegoing’’ enters a ready and waiting reading world, and it is built to satisfy.

Each chapter focuses on a different character in a specific historic moment, alternating between the sisters’ family lines as they move toward the present. Effia marries the British governor of the Cape Coast Castle; her son Quey returns from his education in England to manage the slave trade in his mother’s village; her grandson James rejects slavery and his family’s power; her great-great-great-grandson Yaw becomes an advocate for African independence. Meanwhile, Esi is sold as a slave and shipped to America; her daughter Ness escapes from slavery; Ness’s son Kojo faces the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act in antebellum Baltimore; Kojo’s son H is caught up by racist police in Jim Crow Alabama; and so on.

While the appearance of so many familiar historical tropes like the Underground Railroad, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights movement threaten to create a “Forrest Gump’’-like vibe, there are also illuminating glimpses of less well-known experiences, from free black life in Baltimore and interracial union organizing in 19th-century Alabama coal mines, to African nations manipulating the British and each other during the slave trade. Gyasi is also admirably determined to show the complexities of culpability and affinity. The novel’s African and African-American characters face ceaseless abuse and exploitation from British and white Americans, but they also abuse and exploit each other, fall in love with their oppressors, and engineer their own downfalls, if also their own resurgences. This complexity marks freedom as not just an external but an internal state, so that much more difficult to achieve, though Gyasi never excuses or mitigates the culpable forces of racism and power.

“Homegoing’’ is not just a history lesson, however, but a novel. As such, love is the book’s other fundamental force. If parents abandon their children and lovers are thrust apart, familial and romantic love are nonetheless its strongest engines of resistance, redemption, and hope.

A web of recurring literary motifs and symbols supports these themes, including fire, water, animals, and the black-stone necklaces their mother gives Effia and Esi, which reappear over generations and play a key — albeit expected — role in the novel’s conclusion, itself a coincidence of epic proportion. If these elements suggest that Gyasi is working hard to write literary fiction — and largely succeeding — “Homegoing’’ is ultimately a tad schematic.

Many of the narrative choices can be justified as the overlaying of myth and history, another of Gyasi’s literary strategies, but they are nonetheless more predictable than they need to be. The writing can also be anachronistic in a way that’s not quite worthy of the novel’s ambitions. When Kojo “spen[ds] most nights with his ear against his wife’s barely there stomach, trying to get to know Baby H a little before it arrived’’ or H notes that “his relationship with [wife Ethe] was the longest he’d had a relationship with anyone’’ they sound more like 21st-century television characters than historical figures. A slave dressed like a J. Crew model in “a white button-down with a boat neckline and capped sleeves’’ cements the regret that Gyasi’s editor wasn’t a bit more vigilant.

Still, when Yaw tells his students that “History is Storytelling’’ and “when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? . . . Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too,’’ he gets to the essence of how novels, and this powerful novel in particular, can reveal the large and small significances of history, while also delivering the pleasures of story.

HOMEGOING

By Yaa Gyasi

Knopf, 305 pp., $36.95

Rebecca Steinitz is the author of “Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary.’’ She can be reached at rsteinitz@gmail.com.