The Bone Bearer

He stole six pigs. He made a musical instrument. He gained a friend who would become one of the most powerful rulers in the Eastern Kingdoms. For forty years, their friendship survived mischief, rivalry, dangerous adventures, and the ordinary indignities of growing older. Then one terrible act destroyed the ruler's reputation and cost another man his life. When the disgraced ruler dies, his people refuse him the burial honors of his ancestors. His oldest friend disagrees. Determined to carry the royal bones across thousands of miles of open ocean, he builds a seventy-foot voyaging canoe large enough for a hundred people. Then, partly through principle and partly through stubbornness, he sails alone. On a distant island beneath a sacred star, he encounters a community as generous, quarrelsome, suspicious and complicated as the one he left behind. Among its inhabitants is a woman who is neither impressed by his accomplishments nor particularly interested in his opinions. To his considerable surprise, he falls in love. Inspired by the tangled loyalties of Greek mythology and the extraordinary traditions of Pacific voyaging, The Bone Bearer is a novel about friendship and betrayal, the judgments we make of others, and the kindnesses that survive them. Above all, it asks what we owe the people who have disappointed us, the people who have loved us, and those who may never know what they have given. The dead have no more life to lose. The tragedy is how much of ours we give them.