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.
Author
Adam Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona. He earned a BA in Journalism from Arizona State University in 1992; a MFA from the writing program at McNeese State University, in 1996; and a PhD in English from Florida State University in 2000. Johnson is currently a San Francisco writer and associate professor in creative writing at Stanford University. He founded the Stanford Graphic Novel Project and was named "one of the nation's most influential and imaginative college professors" by Playboy Magazine. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, and The Paris Review. He is the author of Emporium, a short story collection and the novel, Parasites Like Us, which won the California Book Award. His most recent novel, The Orphan Master's Son, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
