Wayfinder

Adam Johnson

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Book cover for Wayfinder
Book cover for Wayfinder

Wayfinder

Wayfinder

Adam Johnson

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Description

A 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. Far from a conventional swashbuckling adventure, it conjures a world of outrigger canoes and celestial navigation, weaving a narrative that is as much about survival and self-discovery as it is about the sweeping history of the Tongan people.

In this monumental literary work, Adam Johnson explores themes of indigeneity, ecological balance, and the resilience of humanity in the face of scarcity, marking the novel as a profound meditation on both individual and cultural legacy.

About the Author

Adam Johnson is the author of Fortune Smiles, winner of the National Book Award and the Story Prize, and The Orphan Master's Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award. Johnson's other awards include a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. His previous books are Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. Johnson was born in South Dakota and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He now lives in San Francisco with his wife and children and teaches creative writing at Stanford University.

Critical Reviews

"Johnson is a master builder of fictive worlds. The Wayfinder is a story of cultural erasure wrapped into a fantastical fable."
--Los Angeles Times

"This is one of [Adam Johnson's] biggest swings yet . . . A sprawling epic."
--Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review

"[Johnson's] audacious, unruly imagination roams with confidence through the island kingdom of Tonga . . . A grand, perilous and transfiguring adventure . . . Enchanted touches are deftly threaded into the rangy storyline by Johnson's richly lyrical prose, which is also capable of handling the social dynamics of the Tongans along with the background stories of royalty and their rivals . . . A world that, like the pendant recovered at the novel's start, feels 'both ancient and startlingly new.'"
--Kirkus Reviews

"A majestic saga of political unrest in the South Pacific and a girl's quest to save her people . . . This is remarkable."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Expansive in scope, historically detailed, and totally enthralling . . . Johnson's monumental research into the history, legacy, and imprint of the Polynesian culture is evident in the meticulous detail of his narrative"
--Booklist (starred review)

"How lucky we are that Adam Johnson has ignited for us this wild, epic, and utterly captivating skein of human history. His years of immersion in the Polynesian oral tradition and research into the Tu'itonga Empire shimmer through The Wayfinder at every twist, but his rollicking storytelling leads the way."
--Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House

"The Wayfinder is a singular achievement. Everything you can ask for in a reading experience, and, because it's Adam Johnson, a little bit more. There are lines in here so pure and direct and lyrical and right, they make my teeth ache."
--Stephen Graham Jones, author of The New York Times Bestseller The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

"Epic in every sense of the word, this is a high wire act that burns the net below. Epic in that it swings with the same music in great works from Gilgamesh on down. Epic in scope that races across time and space until one is no different from the other. Epic in that we are swept up in a journey where not even the reader returns. In The Wayfinder myth becomes fact, magic becomes wisdom, poetry is in the mouths of birds, and a young girl sets out to remake the world."
--Marlon James, Booker Prize winning author of Moon Witch, Spider King

Publishing Information

Publisher: MCD
Pub date: 2025-10-14
Length: 736 pages

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