Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas

**THE INSTANT INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER**

Winner of the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, the Axiom Book Awards Gold Medal for Business History, and the 2024 Taste Canada Culinary Narrative Award

Shortlisted for the 2024 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Taste Canada Award for Culinary Narrative

This is a tale of human obsession, one intrepid tuna, the dedicated fisherman who caught and set her free, the promises and limits of ocean science, and the big truth of how our insatiable appetite for bluefin transformed a cottage industry into a global dilemma.

In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and marked one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England’s coast with a plastic fish tag. Fourteen years later that fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—died in a Mediterranean fish trap, sparking Karen Pinchin’s riveting investigation into the marvels, struggles, and prehistoric legacy of this remarkable species.

Over his fishing career Al marked more than sixty thousand fish with plastic tags, an obsession that made him nearly as many enemies as it did friends. His quest landed him in the crossfire of an ongoing fight between a booming bluefin tuna industry and desperate conservation efforts, a conflict that is once again heating up as overfishing and climate change threaten the fish’s fate.

Kings of Their Own Ocean is an urgent investigation that combines science, business, crime, and environmental justice. As Pinchin writes, “as a global community, we are collectively only ever a few terrible choices away from wiping out any ocean species.” Through her exclusive access and interdisciplinary, mesmerizing lens, readers will join her on boats and docks as she visits tuna hot spots and scientists from Portugal to Japan, New Jersey to Nova Scotia, and glimpse, as the author does, rays of dazzling hope for the future of our oceans.

Karen Pinchin is an award-winning investigative journalist and culinary school graduate. A recent Tow Fellow at PBS's Frontline, she graduated from Columbia Journalism School with a Master of Arts in science journalism and has since been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Sloan Foundation. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Canadian Geographic, Hakai Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and The Walrus, among other outlets. She lives, writes, and fishes in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her husband, son, and a tankful of guppies.