THE WAYFINDER, one of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025!

THE WAYFINDER
ADAM JOHNSON
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Wall Street Journal's The 10 Best Books of 2025

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A historical epic about a girl from a remote Tongan island who becomes her people's queen.

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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Because I read stochastically, I find very long books challenging to complete. It's harder to keep momentum, and information sometimes escapes me; in this book's case, over 700 pages, it worked against the read feeling whole and complete. When it was named one of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025, I realized I was going to have to read the whole book again, this time straight through.

It was worth it. After a slow start acquiring needed information about the dramatis personae (helpfully enumerated in the front of the book,just before the urgently needed map), I was launched into two full reading-days of immersion into Tongan royal politics, Polynesian diaspora politics, LOTS of sexual violence against women (that's the missing star explained), poor resource management decisions and their consequences, and the odd-but-inescapable feeling that this novel was happening in front of me, wasn't fiction but myth reenactment, was an Akashic record playing for me.

I definitely understand why it's on The Washington Post's list. Going through the book in a solid focused way definitely is the way to experience it. The pacing is not fast or page-turny. It's relentless, like the small, innumerable waves lapping against the hull, against the shore, each one easy to ride but all of them adding up to major losses of land, of wooden protective hull, major changes in place and time without much seeming to happen until whipped into fierce destruction by a storm.

Because the read is like sailing on deep waters there's not a linear relationship to time. Quite a lot of people find long reads intimidating. More still find time-jumps distracting. Please believe me: If you can last ~65pp, you can make a very intense and interesting journey with Author Johnson. If that initial part, about the sample you get to read free, is not working for you, maybe this isn't the read for right now. I will note that, if you can read fantasy novels or SF novels, you can cope with the Tongan names and language (you'll get help along the way).

I have snorted derisively at spoilerphobes since y'all emerged from the shadows to bully the rest of us with your demand we worry about your emotional state. It's weird, then, that I look back over this read and think "I do not have the skills to convey the substance of this story even without worrying about spoilers." It is dense, it is immersive, it is seawater and fierce lashing squalls and the utter solitude of the vast deep ocean...but to tell you the story...? Read the synopsis. It's about a third of the story you're being told.

I feel like I'm copping out. Maybe I am. I can say with certainty that I tried hard to figure out how to synopsize with justice the complexities of the story, and failed. What did not fail was the engulfing pull of the story as it moved me from place to place, from person I cared about to villain I didn't (unless we're counting hatred as "caring"), as I watched helpless as people...peoples...made their deaths inevitable. I mourned and cried over a few, the few who are many, and then felt the outrage of being denied what suddenly mattered to me that I have.

It was an excellent read. But, accurate and/or period-appropriate or not, the sexual violence against women...never prurient or played for titillation...just did not ever let me forget its pervasive threat. I can't forget and I don't diminish it.

No matter. I still think you'll get a lot of excellent story-pleasure from this outstanding read.