The Wayfinder
A Novel
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- $329.00
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- $329.00
Descripción editorial
Named one of Ten Best Books of 2025 by The Wall Street Journal
Named one of Ten Best Books of 2025 by The Washington Post
Named a Best Novel of 2025 by NPR and Publishers Weekly
Named a Best Historical Novel of 2025 by The New York Times
“A powerful and original epic . . . Deadly politics, tragic romance and dangerous sea journeys keep the drama at a spirited boil.”
—The New York Times
"An epic of extraordinary abundance . . . modern and mythological. . . wondrous enough to endure."
—The Wall Street Journal
“An epic that feels less created than unearthed . . . The Wayfinder is sui generis — a tapestry of South Pacific myth, archetypal quest, political allegory, environmental jeremiad and feminist revision that feels both ancient and impossibly relevant."
—The Washington Post
Talking corpses, poetic parrots, and a fan that wafts the breath of life—this is the world young Kōrero 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 Kōrero 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 Kōrero 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 Kōrero 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 Shōgun, the 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Orphan Master's Son, unfolds a majestic saga of political unrest in the South Pacific and a girl's quest to save her people. It begins during the reign of the Tu‘i Tonga Empire, sometime in the Middle Ages, with the arrival of two strangers from Tongatapu, the empire's seat, to the remote and peaceful Bird Island, where the people are about to starve from lack of resources. The unbidden travelers are two younger sons of the recently deceased Tongan king, on a mission to restore order after their treacherous uncle's rise to power. In exchange for exclusive access to food sources on a sacred royal island, Korero and her people agree to join Tonga's struggle. The sweeping plot is packed with harrowing depictions of war's moral abyss and heart-wrenching lovers' tales, most touchingly in a twisty Shakespearean development involving the princes' oldest brother and his beloved. Through it all, Johnson poignantly captures how the characters' culture is forged by their oral history tradition: "That's why stories are sacred," Korero tells a fellow islander, explaining why it's important to remember that they descended from slaves and once faced war themselves. "That's why we preserve and repeat them. That's why we're careful never to let one slip through our fingers." This is remarkable.
