Center for the literary arts in New York State
A POLYNESIAN EPIC
Adam Johnson
4:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 28, 2025
University at Albany
Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center
1400 Washington Avenue, Albany NY 12222 See map
Adam Johnson, major contemporary novelist, received the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel of North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son. He also received the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection, Fortune Smiles.
His new novel, The Wayfinder (2025), about a girl from a remote Tongan island who becomes her people's queen, has been praised as "An epic of extraordinary abundance... modern and mythological... wondrous enough to endure" (The Wall Street Journal) and “A powerful and original epic... Deadly politics, tragic romance and dangerous sea journeys keep the drama at a spirited boil.” (The New York Times)
Cosponsored by the English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project, the Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI), the Honors College, and the Indigenous Student Association.
(Photo credit: Justice Johnson)
from the publisher
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.
reviews
“Novels are long divorced from the oral tradition; few are designed to last beyond their reading. But some books—Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), for instance, or Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985)—continue to be passed down, like legends. Predicting posterity is impossible, but The Wayfinder is this kind of work, modern and mythological. It is good enough, wondrous enough, to endure.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“An epic that feels less created than unearthed . . . Johnson’s dizzying attention to the mercurial crosscurrents of conquest recalls . . . Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. His bold melding of magic and psychological realism casts a spell as captivating as Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Yet 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."
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Johnson is a master builder of fictive worlds. The Wayfinder is a story of cultural erasure wrapped into a fantastical fable.”
—Los Angeles Times
“This is one of [Adam Johnson's] biggest swings yet . . . A sprawling epic.”
—Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review
“[An] epic-scale historical adventure from Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson . . . Johnson paints a rich tale of nature, politics, and tradition . . . It's a unique, spellbinding saga that drew us into an elaborate world.”
—Apple's Best of the Month