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 • Winner of the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Non-Fiction • Shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize • Winner of the 2023 Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Paradigm Prize • Finalist for the 2024 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction • Silver medalist in Culinary Narratives for the Taste Canada Awards

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 tagged one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England's coast. Fourteen years later that same fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—was caught again, this time in a Mediterranean fish trap. 

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. Through Karen Pinchin's exclusive interviews and access, interdisciplinary approach, and mesmerizing storytelling, readers 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 Pinchin does, rays of dazzling hope for the future of our oceans.