The Wayfinder: A Novel

by Adam Johnson

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son returns with a gripping story of community and survival with a resilient young girl at its center.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374619572
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/14/2025
Pages:	736
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

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.

Hometown:

San Francisco, California

Date of Birth:

July 12, 1967

Place of Birth:

South Dakota

Education:

B.A., Arizona State University, 1992; M.A., M.F.A., McNeese State University, 1996; Ph.D., Florida State, 2001