Shark Dialogues cover

Shark Dialogues

by Kiana Davenport

Four Hawaiian women. Five generations. The kingdom that was stolen.

For you if

you want to understand Hawaii's history through the women who carried it across five generations

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

Supports independent bookstores

— OR —

Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$9 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

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.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Hawaii
Voice
Written by a Hawaii author

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Everything is Illuminated poster

Everything is Illuminated(2005)

dir. Liev Schreiber

Digging up a family's buried history.

A young Jewish American man travels to Ukraine with an eccentric translator and his grandfather to find the woman who saved his grandfather's life during the Nazi invasion, and a small Ukrainian town that was wiped off the map. Adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in blending absurdist comedy with Holocaust memory without ever trivializing either — the film trusts that grief and humor can share the same road trip. Pedagogical in showing how erased places and people can still be located, if someone is willing to look hard enough.

Letterboxd ↗