Shark Dialogues

Four granddaughters of a legendary Hawaiian woman — half-Chinese, descended from a man who swam with sharks — converge on the Big Island. Davenport moves across 150 years of Hawaiian history: the arrival of Christian missionaries, the overthrow of the kingdom, the sugar plantation era, the military occupation, contemporary tourism. She writes in a prose saturated with the landscape — the lava, the ocean, the specific light of the islands — while the history she's tracking is one of systematic dispossession. The most mythologically rich Hawaiian dispatch on this shelf.