Leaves of the Banyan Tree

Three generations of a Samoan family across the 20th century — the patriarch Tauilopepe who builds wealth by abandoning everything traditional, his son who falls apart under the weight of his father's ambitions, his grandson who tries to find a way through. Wendt is the father of Pacific literature in English and this is his most ambitious novel — a dispatch from inside the specific Pacific experience of colonialism, Christianity, and modernity arriving simultaneously and the generations it takes for a family to process that collision. The most important Samoan novel in English.