Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant

Friday 9th September, 1:00pm
Cafe Nola

Join us for a literary lunch at Café Nola with best selling author Cristina Sanders.

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Cristina will be talking about her vivid imagining of the mystery of the General Grant, a three-mastered sailing ship that was wrecked against the cliffs of the Auckland Islands. Only fourteen men made 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 are a disparate group with their own secrets to keep. The enduring mystery about how much gold went down with the ship, and the location of the wreck itself echo through Cristina’s own telling of this historically grounded tale.

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Cristina’s debut novel, Jerningham, about Jerningham Wakefield and the recklessness of colonial New Zealand and of a charismatic young man's rise and inevitable fall, was published in 2020 and shortlisted for the NZ Heritage Literary Awards.

In 2020 Cristina won the Storylines Tessa Duder Award for an unpublished YA manuscript, with a novel about immigrant families in the 1870s. This became Displaced, which was published in 2021.