Mrs Jewell and the wreck of the General Grant - Cristina Sanders

It’s 1866 and the three-masted sailing ship General Grant is on the southern route from Melbourne to London, with gold from the diggings secreted in returning miners’ hems and pockets. In the fog and the dark, the ship strikes the cliffs of the Auckland Islands, is sucked into a cave and wrecked.

Only fourteen men make it ashore and one woman – Mrs Jewell. Stuck on a freezing and exposed island, the castaways have to work together to stay alive, but they’re a disparate group with their own secrets to keep and their only officer is disabled by grief after losing his wife in the wreck. A woman is a burden they don’t need.

Meanwhile stories about the gold grow with the telling: who has it, where is it and how much went down with the ship.

From the author of the bestselling Jerningham, Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant is a vivid imagining of the story behind the enduring mystery of one of New Zealand’s early shipwrecks.

Cristina Sanders grew up in the family’s Gateway Bookshop in Wellington and has been a keen reader ever since. She worked in publishing and book marketing and had a career in business before becoming a writer. An obsession with New Zealand colonial history and geography defines her stories for adults and young adults.

Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant was a finalist for the 2023 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. The novels Jerningham and Displaced were both shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Literary Awards. Displaced won the 2020 Storylines Tessa Duder Award and has been shortlisted for the 2022 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

Cristina has appeared at the Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival. She lives in Hawke’s Bay and is a regular volunteer crew member of the youth training ship the Spirit of New Zealand, where the sailing and the sailors keep her well supplied with yarns.

The Cuba Press, 2022. Paperback, 326 pages. 

ISBN: 978-1-98-859555-9

Condition: new paperback.