The Floating City

In a hot Honolulu morning in 1895, a dead man washes up on a beach. Eva Hanson-fortune-teller, itinerant, a woman who has left her own troubled past behind-takes up the mystery of this body in a tale that takes us deeply into the turbulent politics of the Hawaiian Islands at their turning point. In poetic, luminous prose, Pamela Ball reveals a history that has been almost entirely hidden, both in recent fiction and in the history books: of the time when first the American missionaries, then the sugar fields, and finally the United States army transformed this landscape forever. Encompassing the experiences both of a rebellious, passionate woman and of the imprisoned Queen Lili'uoakalani whose fortune she foretold, The Floating City is a small masterpiece of depth and originality.