Because they blend fact with fiction, historical novels are tricky to write. But they can be wonderful to read: history is full of holes; historical fiction fills them in.

Mary Renault let readers see Alexander the Great at his most intimate through the eyes of "The Persian Boy." More recently T. Coraghessan Boyle probed "sex doctor" Alfred Kinsey in "The Inner Circle." Hawai'i has its share of imagined histories, the best-known being James Michener's "Hawaii," and perhaps the best being Kaua'i-born O.A. Bushnell's "Ka'a'awa."

James Houston, whose last book was "Hawaiian Son," for which he served as wordsmith for music legend Eddie Kamae, and who may be best known in the Islands as co-author, with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, of "Farewell to Manzanar," now puts us in the inner circle of King Kalakaua as we follow Nani Keala, a half-Hawaiian, half-American Indian girl from California.

In "Bird of Another Heaven," out tomorrow from Alfred A. Knopf, Houston tells a tale of two cities, and of families, divided by the Pacific Ocean. While the book is fiction, the impeccably researched story sweeps the reader up in its depiction of late-19th century Honolulu and San Francisco, and prompts exclamations of "I didn't know that." (Did you know the first structures at what is now Sacramento, Calif., were Hawaiian grass houses?)

The trans-Pacific epic was indirectly inspired by Houston's 1908 house, which first led to his previous novel, "Snow Mountain Passage," about a family that journeys to California with the ill-fated Donner Party.

"Some of the members landed here in Santa Cruz, where I now live, and that's how I got interested in the Donner Party story," says Houston. "I kind of came into it by the side door, living in this old house where one of the Donner Party survivors had lived. But as I researched the story, I kept coming across references to these Hawaiians who had come into California with John Sutter and helped him build Sutter's Fort. And then I came across the story of one of the daughters of one of these Hawaiians after they had spent some time with John Sutter and got involved in the Gold Rush in the mid-19th century. They all married into northern California Indian tribes." (To this day, says Houston, there are people who are a blend of variations of Hawaiian, Indian, Spanish and other European blood. Cue: I didn't know that!)

That daughter inspired his heroine, Nani Keala. She was "this woman who was half Hawaiian and half California Indian." Around the age of 12 her parents died and she worked as a domestic for a white rancher.

"She grew up in northern California speaking Hawaiian, her tribal language, English and a little Spanish. This gave her an extraordinary kind of mobility for a woman of that era, no matter what her ethnicity," says Houston.

'AN AMAZING STORY'

What especially piqued the writer was the family legend that this hapa woman knew King Kalakaua and may have been with him when he died in San Francisco's Palace Hotel in 1891.

"When I heard that, something clicked in my mind," says Houston. "This is an amazing story, even if it isn't true."

So even though after finishing "Snow Mountain Passage" he thought "I'd had my fill of writing historical fiction," the story of Nani Keala's real-life counterpart "just haunted me. I couldn't stay away from it," says Houston.

And for San Francisco-born Houston, who as writer for Kamae's Hawaiian Legacy films often visits Honolulu, the story united two meaningful places.

"I kind of go back and forth in my writing between California and Hawai'i. Here was a story that joined the two places in the life of this one rather amazing woman."

The novel's framework is built around two narratives — Nani Keala's story unravels when Bay Area talk-show host Sheridan Wadell discovers that the man he thought was his father, isn't. His biological father is a part-Hawaiian man — the grandson of Nani Keala. And the hunt for his family history begins.

"I wanted there to be a link between the historical period and the contemporary world," says Houston.

As Wadell reads his great-grandmother's journals, Houston describes Nani Keala's upbringing in an Indian tribe, then her discovery of similarly spiritual Hawaiian ways when she is drawn to Hawai'i (and Kalakaua) in search of her paternal roots.

With that time comes the turmoil of a country caught between old and new. Giles Peabody III, the grandson of a "fire-and-brimstone sermonizer" is a missionary-descendant composite who, after Kalakaua declares in a speech that the McKinley bill is "the death of our culture," writes in a newspaper, "If this be culture, then the sooner the better."

The words resonate at a time when contentious Makua Valley is the subject of an art show and the Big Island is hatching a colony of Stryker vehicles.

"When you read the documents that we have from the late 19th century, statements like that are commonplace," says Houston. "There are a lot of people who orchestrated the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy who by their own statements saw the Hawaiians as barbarians, as second-class citizens, second-class minds, saw Hawaiian culture as something to be disposed of."

1894 FAIR AN 'EYE OPENER'

The piercing metaphor of that disposal is the "Hawaiian Village" at the 1894 Midwinter International Fair and Exposition.

"The fair was an eye opener for me," says Houston. "It was a big event and millions of people came and went, yet it was sort of forgotten. I grew up in San Francisco and used to play right around the area in Golden Gate Park where that fair was set up and knew nothing about it until I was researching this novel."

He was amazed to find out the fair included a Hawaiian exhibit. In the San Francisco Public Library's special collections are photographs of the "village" and a "room devoted to the trappings of the throne room from 'Iolani Palace. They had silverware and dishes and koa bowls and big kahilis and the throne ... and this was before the United States government had recognized the revolutionary party as the actual government of Hawai'i.

"I saw that ... and thought, 'My God, Lili'uokalani thought she still had a chance, but the people who at that point were in charge of Hawai'i assumed that those days were over, the monarchy was finished, Hawaiian control of Hawai'i was finished, and everything's reduced to a sideshow.' I wanted that to be part of the novel because I don't think many people in Hawai'i today are aware of that exhibit, and what it represented."

This isn't the first time Houston, who first visited the Islands when they were still a territory, has addressed Hawai'i issues — he tackled a clash between Hawaiian culture and geothermal development in his 1998 novel "The Last Paradise."

But ultimately Houston wanted to tell the story of a "talented man of letters" struggling between two cultures and a cross-cultural love story with a political backdrop. It's "really a family story," he says. "Novels are usually about families."

Hawai'i film commissioner Donne Dawson says the state is still "waiting to see our version of 'Dances With Wolves,' 'Braveheart' or 'Whale Rider.' " A film adaptation of "Bird of Another Heaven" could be it.

Reach Lesa Griffith at lgriffith@honoluluadvertiser.com.