The Wayfinder
by Adam Johnson
Buy on AmazonA historical epic about a girl from a remote Tongan island who becomes her people's queen. The Wayfinder is an epic, sweeping novel set in the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific during the height of the Tu’i Tonga Empire. At its heart is Kōrero, a young girl chosen to save her people from the brink of starvation. Her quest takes her from her remote island home on a daring seafaring journey across a vast ocean empire built on power, consumption, and bloodshed. With the grandeur of Wolf Hall, Shogun, and War and Peace, The Wayfinder immerses readers in a world untouched by Western influence, evoking the lost art of oral storytelling.…
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"Adam Johnson’s back catalog doesn’t take up much shelf space – just four titles in the last 20-plus years. Of course, he won a National Book Award for one of those books, Fortune Smiles, and a Pulitzer Prize for another, The Orphan Master’s Son. Johnson’s first novel in more than a decade shows that the intervening years haven’t dimmed his ambition any. Anybody who knows a kid under 10 may hear echoes of Moana in The Wayfinder’s jacket copy, but the arc of a would-be teenage voyager is just one thread in an impressively dense weave. As he did with North Korea before this, Johnson takes a remote setting – in this case, the Tongan Empire of the Middle Ages – and eschews cliché for living detail, animating this swashbuckling adventure with vivid characters, unnerving violence and more than one literal bag of human bones."
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