In Adam Johnson’s “The Wayfinder,” a highlight in a strong year of fiction, a young woman on a Polynesian island more than 500 years in the past ponders the significance of a whale that has beached on ...

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Any western worth its dusty boots and big-sky openness should know what’s breathtaking about freedom, at the same time grasping how being tamed is an uneasy, clarifying rite of passage. That men have ...