The Wayfinder

"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."