The Wayfinder

From the author of The Orphan Master’s Son (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) and Fortune Smiles (winner of the US National Book Award) a mythic masterpiece named one of ‘Ten Best Books of 2025’ by the Wall Street Journaland the Washington Post

‘An epic of extraordinary abundance… modern and mythological… wondrous enough to endure’ Wall Street Journal

‘Adam Johnson’s awesome new novel… takes place almost a thousand years ago in Polynesia, but its real setting is that realm beyond time and place where mortals contend with gods, and mythology and history merge like twinned tree trunks…  This astonishing novel, at once so primeval and so sophisticated, pulses with the same hopes and terrors that first pricked our imaginations around a fire as the sun set - a tapestry of South Pacific myth, archetypal quest, political allegory, environmental jeremiad and feminist revision that feels both ancient and impossibly relevant.’ Washington Post

Talking corpses, poetic parrots, and a fan that wafts the breath of life?this is the world young Korero finds herself thrust into when a mysterious visitor lands on her island, a place so remote its inhabitants have forgotten the word for stranger. Her people are desperate and on the brink of starvation, and the wayward stranger offers them an impossible choice: they can remain in the only home they’ve ever known and await the uncertainty to come, or Korero can join him and venture into unfamiliar waters, guided by only the night sky and his assurance of a bountiful future in the Kingdom of Tonga. What Korero and her people don’t know is that the promised refuge is no utopia?instead, Tonga is an empire at war and on the verge of collapse, a place where brains are regularly liberated from skulls and souls get trapped in coconuts with some frequency.

The perils of Tonga are compounded by a royal feud: loyalties are shifting, graves are being opened, and everyone lives in fear of a jellyfish tattoo. Here, survival can rest on a perfectly performed dance or the acceptance of a cup of kava. Together, the stranger and Korero embark upon an epic voyage?one that will deliver them either to salvation or to the depths of the Pacific.

Evoking the grandeur of Wolf Hall and the splendor of Shogun, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Adam Johnson conjures oral history, restores the natural world, and locates what’s best in humanity. Toweringly ambitious and breathtakingly immersive, The Wayfinder is an instant, timeless classic.

‘Epic in every sense of the word, this is a high wire act that burns the net below.’ Marlon James, Booker-Prizewinning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings