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The Wayfinder

A Novel

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Pub Date Oct 14 2025 | Archive Date Nov 14 2025

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.

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...


A Note From the Publisher

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.

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...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780374619572
PRICE $30.00 (USD)
PAGES 736

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Average rating from 6 members


Featured Reviews

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC of The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson.

I give this 4.5 stars overall.

I absolutely love Adam Johnson's work. Both The Orphan Master's Son and Fortune Smiles are favorites of mine . His short story, Nirvana, lives rent free in my head. The man is just talented. He's a must read for me.

The Wayfinder, a historical epic, was not what I expected from him, but one that I fully embrace on the other side of those 736 pages. Johnson has wells of range and the artistic vision and The Wayfinder is a shining example of how we can always expect whatever comes next from him will be top tier.

The story is told over two timelines, which may not seem clear in the first 15% or so, but does solidify early-ish in the novel. One timeline follows Kōrero, a young woman on an island inhabited by shipwrecked slaves three generations ago. No strangers have visited their island, and it is rapidly nearing the full depletion of its resources with no wood available for boats and no community members with the skills to sail. or navigate. By some miracle, two young brothers on their own journey wash ashore on Kōrero's island and her people begin to determine a way to save themselves.

The other timeline happens in the very near past and revolves around the two brothers and their family and their longer journey to end up on Kōrero's island. My one of three minor gripes with this whole novel is this narrative difference, because, with the timelines being so close in time, it, at times, did not work for me. Truly, what I wanted was more of Kōrero and her journey. thinking from the description that this is about her journey to leadership, but I think the majority of the book is about the brothers and the royal family of Tonga and the empire's negative influences. I think I would have been fine if the first timeline came first and there was a second part of the novel with Kōrero's storyline and that would have made everything feel more balanced instead of back-and-forth just when you get invested in each part. But honestly, that's very minor, because Johnson tells the story of the Tu'i Tonga empire and introduces the characters in such a way that you want to know more about each of them and you want each chapter to spend more time with whomever is being featured at the moment. (The second gripe is I didn't ever have any idea of what century/time I was in exactly, given all my knowledge of the Tongan empire comes from this book, so I would have loved some references to the year, both when this begins and how much time passes with all of these water journeys, because I wasn't sure how long the timeline actually was. The third gripe is that I wanted to know for sure about Papa Toki, Hine and the others given Kōrero's tasks at the end of the novel - I think having a knowledge of how much time had passed in the novel would have helped with this).

Johnson does not shy away from darker aspects of war, PTSD, sexual assault of women, and slavery. He also features the depletion of resources and extinction of animals, the purposeful burning of islands to de-home inhabitants, and the offerings required to the kingdom that leave communities with nothing. The overarching story covers the themes of empire, of environmental and animal conservation, and of trauma, while also bringing messages of hope and healing and forgiveness and the power of community and nonviolence in a world full of violence.

There are little note sections interspersed throughout chapters that convey the oral storytelling traditions of the Tongans and recount tales that may directly influence the characters or the history and culture. There is also a lot of poetry and translations of Tongan and Fijian language that adds emphasis to the stories. You can tell Johnson researched and carefully arranged these stories and these usages, and I appreciate his efforts to respectfully bring this empire to life in so many faceted ways.

When it comes to characters, Johnson can make you both love and hate a horrendous character, or feel such sympathy for those that don't have the freedom to feel it for themselves: Aho, Tapoto, Lolohea, the Wayfinder, Finau, Moon Appearing, the Tu'i Tonga, Sun Shower, the Tamaha, Punake, Havea, Tiri, etc. etc. So many characters have the opportunity to shine and show multifaceted personalities and character arcs, and all the arcs felt true to what we were told of those people. Even knowing with Johnson's hints who would die several chapters ahead, it would still hit like a gut punch even when you learned more about the other characters and their motivations, while not ideal, were valid to their feelings. This is what makes Johnson so fantastic - he can make you cheer for a character and in the next sentence turn that on a dime and it is all entirely planned for.

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