The Center for Fiction Presents Adam Johnson on The Wayfinder with Amitav Ghosh

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT October 14, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Book Jacket - The Wayfinder

Join us in welcoming Pulitzer Prize-winning author Adam Johnson (The Orphan Master’s Son) to The Center for Fiction this fall to celebrate the release of his new novel, The Wayfinder. Amitav Ghosh, author of The Ibis Trilogy, will serve as the evening’s moderator.

An epic tale set in the South Pacific Polynesian islands, The Wayfinder follows a young girl on a seafaring journey through the vast and dangerous Tongan Empire to save her people from the brink of starvation. As Kōrero navigates a world untouched by Western fingerprints, readers face hauntingly relevant questions about scarcity, ecological balance, and indigeneity. This must-read novel urges us to consider how struggles for resilience mold our individual and cultural legacies.

Join Johnson and Ghosh at The Center to explore this larger-than-life novel. After the event, Johnson will sign books.

Book Jacket - The Wayfinder

Featuring

  • Author Photo - Adam Johnson - credit to Justice Johnson

    Adam Johnson

    Adam Johnson

    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.


    Photo Credit: Justice Johnson

  • Portrait de l'auteur indien Amitav Ghosh. Paris, le 31 août 2021.

    Amitav Ghosh

    Amitav Ghosh

    Amitav Ghosh grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is the author of four books of non-fiction, two collections of essays and nine novels. His books have won many prizes and he has received seven honorary degrees, six lifetime achievement awards and four honorary fellowships. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. In 2018 he became the first English-language writer to receive India’s highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. In 2024 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2025 he was awarded the Pak Kyongni Prize by South Korea’s Toji Foundation. He is married to the writer Deborah Baker and lives in Brooklyn, New York.


    Photo Credit: Mathieu Genon

Featured Book

  1. . 
    Book Jacket - The Wayfinder

    The Wayfinder

    By Adam Johnson

    Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    PURCHASE

    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.

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