Age: 41
female
Jena Malone (born November 21, 1984) is an American actress, musician, and photographer. She made her film debut in Bastard Out of Carolina (1996) and has appeared in films including Ellen Foster (1997), Contact (1997), Stepmom (1998), For Love of the Game (1999), Donnie Darko (2001), Life as a House (2001), Saved! (2004), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Into the Wild (2007), The Ruins (2008), Sucker Punch (2011), The Hunger Games film series (2013–15), The Neon Demon (2016), Nocturnal Animals (2016), and Antebellum (2020). Malone is also an indie pop musician who has released music both under her own name (as "Jena Malone and Her Bloodstains") and as one-half of the duo The Shoe.
Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama. Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford 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 a knee 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. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.
