As so often happens with Hawaii’s young people, author Susanna Moore left the islands at 17 to pursue her education and ended up living away for years — almost 50 years, in her case, on the mainland and abroad.

She never went to college. With an appetite for reading that devoured the entire adult collection of the public library near Punaluu during one childhood summer, she learned from books and real life.

"I lived in quite a few places, to my own surprise. … I mean, how could it have been 30 years in New York?" said Moore by phone from her home in Kapaau on the Big Island (she finally moved back in 2013). Her voice is high-pitched and breathy, and she speaks with an unaffected but faintly upper-crust accent (she lived in Bryn Mawr, Pa., until age 5 and in London in her early 30s).

"I’ve gotten old so fast!" lamented the former actress and model, who has let her long hair go gray but whose girlish figure, wide dark eyes and still-adventurous lifestyle belie her 69 years.

In light of the persuasively written young heroines of her seven novels, all of whom travel far from their own cultures in pursuit of new experiences, "old" is not a word a reader would readily associate with Moore.

Her first novel, "My Old Sweetheart," was published in 1982. The story of a local Caucasian girl, her adopted Japanese brother, her fragile, mentally ill mother and her discovery of her father’s love affair was praised by Joan Didion as "one of those brilliant objects that come along only rarely, all light on clear water, and then one realizes the faster currents underneath, the terrible swiftness of sex and time."

Her other novels include "The Whiteness of Bones," "In the Cut" and "The Life of Objects," and there’s a memoir, "I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai’i."

The impulse to reach back and understand a far earlier time led Moore to write her first book of history, "Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii," to be released Tuesday by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

"Paradise" begins before the arrival of the first Polynesian settlers and ends with Hawaii’s annexation by the United States. Moore said she felt there was a need for a new history revisiting the eras covered by Gavan Daws’ "Shoal of Time" and Ralph S. Kuykendall’s "The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778-1854" and "The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1874-1893," all three published in the 1960s.

She found the project difficult at first "because the subject was so huge and it was unclear to me what I was going to write about. In the end it always comes down to the same thing: What interests you? And as is true of most of my books, what interested me was the role of women."

In the summer of 2012, Moore rented a house in Waimea for four months. "When I was thrashing around trying to narrow my research, I mentioned to two young women, one of whom had gone to Punahou and the other to Kamehameha Schools, that I was thinking of writing about Kaahumanu. And they said she was awful, she was not good for the Hawaiian people."

Moore was startled that the women, "who were young enough to have had the benefit of the new Hawaiian studies," would be dismissive of Hawaii’s first queen, who ruled as regent with her stepson, Liholiho, after the death of her husband, Kamehameha I. It was Kaahumanu who abolished the kapu that treated women as inferiors and successfully promoted Hawaiian literacy.

Moore said she disagrees with the tendency to idealize Kamehameha "as someone who was in himself perfect and godlike. … He was not perfect, and I don’t know why we would expect him to be."

In "Paradise" she draws a human portrait of Kamehameha as a brilliant warrior and leader with flaws and contradictions. On the one hand, his refusal to punish the fisherman who had struck him while protecting a child resulted in the humane Law of the Splintered Paddle. On the other, when the British explorer George Vancouver orchestrated a reconciliation of the estranged royal couple on board his ship, the young Kaahumanu requested that the captain ask the king to stop beating her.

Even before any westerners came to the islands, strong, educated women like Kaahumanu — a treasured child whose parents’ court attracted artists, dancers and storytellers — could own land, become chiefs and go to war. A believer in historical determinism, Moore said Hawaiian women were bound to have sought greater independence and power.

As her book reminds us, the kapu and the old gods had been overthrown by Kaahumanu a year before the first missionaries arrived.

"Someone said to me the other day that it’s awful that the kapu ended. I said, ‘A girl could be put to death for eating a banana — what are you talking about?’"

Like Moore’s fictional heroines, Kaahumanu is introduced as a young woman embarked on an adventure.

"She was brought here to Kohala from Maui, where her father was king, when she was very young," Moore said. "Kamehameha saw her and not only was he well aware of the political power a marriage would bring, but she was beautiful … very strong-willed, clearly intelligent, not passive, not easily intimidated. She was extraordinary."

As was he, Moore added.

Their lifelong love story binds the many threads of "Paradise of the Pacific" together, along with the marriage — tempestuous in its own way — of the missionary couple Asa and Lucy Thurston.

The hard work, courage and inadvertent comedy faced by missionary women are beautifully drawn in the book. In one memorable scene, Kaahumanu stops by nude on her way back from the beach and sits on the couch for a nice chat alongside her prim hostess.

But overall, "Paradise" is harsh in its assessment of the missionaries.

Not only did they and their descendants end up with much of the land and power in the islands, but by "introducing guilt and sin, making them wear clothes, taking away hula and surfing, the missionaries deprived the Hawaiians of joy," Moore said.

And although she "reveres" Kaahumanu, she faults the queen for throwing out the old rules without putting new ones in place, leaving a vacuum the missionaries filled. "The old system had given Hawaiians a form of independence — particularly the commoners, despite their indenture," Moore said.

Publication of Moore’s book happens to coincide with a highly charged atmosphere of cultural correctness in Hawaii, evidenced by Native Hawaiian protests against the observatories on Mauna Kea and Haleakala and other controversies. Asked whether she felt trepidation at being the non-Hawaiian author of a Hawaiian history, Moore said she preferred to let her book speak for her.

"Anyone who reads the book surely will see how fair-minded I have tried to be," she wrote in a follow-up email. It would be unfortunate, she added, "if I am thought less capable to write about Hawaii simply because I am a haole."

As luck would have it, "Paradise of the Pacific" would prove to be the vessel that brought Moore home to stay; she had tried, but failed, to gain a foothold before.

"I used to write every year to the head of the department of creative writing at the University of Hawaii at Manoa to say I would be very interested to be a writer in residence," said Moore, who has taught at Yale, NYU and Princeton, as well as in a New Jersey women’s prison and a Manhattan homeless shelter. Her interest wasn’t reciprocated, she said.

"Paradise" didn’t help her find a job, but it did help Moore fall in love.

During her Waimea summer, Moore went to dinner at a friend’s house and saw a face from the distant past: William Chillingworth, a Hawaiian-haole kamaaina whom she’d last seen when she was a 14-year-old student at Punahou School. "And that was it!" Moore said. They married the following May.

She and Chillingworth share a love of Hawaii’s natural landscape: He is the author of "Io Lani: The Hawaiian Hawk," winner of the 2015 Ka Po’okela Award of Excellence in illustrative or photographic books from the Hawaii Booksellers Association.

When she returns to teach at Princeton, for one semester a year, Moore stays for four months in the Lower East Side townhouse of the New York artist Kiki Smith. It’s a dangerous neighborhood and she likes that, Moore said. She also gets to see her grown daughter, Lulu Sylbert, who lives in Brooklyn.

Smith’s house is mostly empty, Moore said. "Just me and her sculpture: a deer giving birth to a woman, Red Riding Hood with the face of a wolf." At first it spooked her, especially at twilight, but now she likes it. "She’s been working on tapestries filled with woodland creatures, so it’s like being in an enchanted forest. It’s quite magical, a magic kingdom."

Similarly,"Paradise" captivatingly describes Hawaii’s forests, ocean, gods and wildlife, the stories and spells that held its people together in their own magic kingdom, in a raw landscape isolated from the rest of the world.

In Hawaii, when Moore and her four younger siblings were not in school, they wandered the countryside barefoot, unsupervised. Their mother died when Moore was 12. Afterward the children lived in what she has described as a somewhat chilly home with their father, a military doctor, and their stepmother.

Nature filled the void. Moore would explore the Tantalus woods with childhood friend Tommy Holmes, co-author of "The Hawaiian Canoe" and co-founder of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. She would ask permission of the moo (a lizardlike spirit) before she entered the forest.

When she first left Hawaii at 17, Moore went briefly to New York, where she worked in various modeling jobs, and then to Los Angeles, where she was a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and had a role in the movie "Shampoo." There she met husband-and-wife writers John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, who became godparents to her daughter.

"She has a great affection for Hawaii," Moore said of Didion, now widowed, whom she sees in New York. "I send her leis all the time." She added that Didion and Dunne, on their frequent trips to Hawaii, always visited the grave of Moore’s mother at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.

"Hawaii is a story of arrivals," Moore writes in "Paradise." For the lucky and devoted, like Moore, it is also a story of returns.

Excerpted from "Paradise of the Pacific" by Susanna Moore, to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright 2015 by Susanna Moore. All rights reserved.

The Tahitians of the Long Voyages brought with them the god Kane, lord of creation, the ancestor of both chiefs and commoners, and god of sunlight, fresh water, and forests; Lono, the god of clouds, winds, peace, agriculture, and fishing; and Ku, a male fertility symbol and the god of war, canoe-making, and the rising sun. There was Kanaloa, the Enemy, god of the sea, the Hot-Striking Octopus, but also god of healing. It was at this time, too, that the fire goddess Pele, capricious, cruel, jealous, and vengeful, appeared with her five compelling brothers and sister, to make her home in Kilauea crater on the Big Island.

Those first Hawaiians became acquainted with two manifestations of divine power they could not have seen in the land of their birth. With a fine sense of relationships, and their realists’ humor, they decided that these novel forces must be feminine. The blazing, impulsive, destructive, hot-tempered, and beautiful one who issued so unpredictably from her underground realm they called Pele. The haughty, pallid, silent, cold maiden who never deigned to descend from her lofty mountain citadels they named Poli’ahu … Pele as their Earth Goddess in her triple manifestations: as Mother, maker of mountains and of islands and humankind; as Lover-Pursuer-Virago, devourer of men who do not heed her power, no matter how handsome and accomplished they may think they are; and, finally, as Kuku Wahine, Grandmother, who receives in her wrinkled bosom the bodies of the dead, taking them into her care once more.

Hundreds of lesser gods represented temporal objects as well as abstractions and states of being — gods of fish, reptiles, birds, mountains, revenge, music, strange noises, trees, hills, rain, pigs, empty houses, the sick, peace and war, stones, the insane, the dance, canoes, and darkness and light. The very trees in the forests were spirits. The ‘ohi’a tree was thought to have a human voice and to cry in pain when cut, and the wood used by a man to make an image of a god was thereafter kapu to him (in this usage, kapu does not mean forbidden, but special, unique, or exclusive). The enticing calls and songs of the woodland spirits filled the forests with incessant sound.

"The forty thousand little gods" … moved so easily in and out of the all-embracing spirit world. These lived in mountains and hills, in valleys, caves, and stones; in trees, herbs, ferns, and grasses; in fishes, birds, and beasts of every kind; in springs, streams, swamps, and drops of dew; in mists, clouds, thunder, lightning, winds; and in the wandering planets, the glittering far-off stars.

Like the original voyagers of the sixth century, the later settlers venerated the spirits, or ‘aumakua, who served as intermediaries between humankind and the great gods. An ‘aumakua, which was mortal as well as divine, could be, among other things, a shark, eel, hawk, limpet, a red-haired woman (symbolizing a volcano), lizard, wild goose, mouse, caterpillar, or owl. An ‘aumakua, which is particular to individuals and to families to this day, represented both fertility and a deified ancestor, the two becoming indistinguishable with time.

People were very frightened of a guardian, or kahu, of the shark, who smeared his skin with turmeric, kept his head covered, and spoke in a hushed voice. In heiau dedicated to shark gods, the priests rubbed themselves with salt to give an appearance of scales, and uttered piercing shrieks. Kahu of Pele, the fire goddess, coated their long hair with red dust, and made their eyes red. The fact that sharks happen to devour people, and volcanoes destroy entire villages, helped to underline the magical connection between the visible danger (the kahu) and the invisible danger (the god).