Not only a mesmerising place to visit, the Marlborough Sounds and its bountiful history have inspired many kiwi authors to include the sounds as a setting for their stories to take place in or for local residents to share their family’s history and experiences of life away from the mainland. We would like to share some of these books with you in the coming newsletters.

Written by ex-Kiwi teacher turned adventurer Jon Tucker, Those Shipwrecked Kids takes you on a journey through the sounds.

Jon Tucker spent his childhood years cruising the Marlborough Sounds in his family’s Woollacott cutter and has since regularly returned in his own traditional 45ft ketch with his wife and five sons. The family has also sailed extensively throughout the Pacific and beyond, but he still considers the Sounds to be one of the most magic places in the world for boating.

He has written a series of five award-winning illustrated chapter books for middle-year children, aged 9 to 14, based on the experiences of two voyaging families. Jon draws on real places and events to create plausible adventures, while also embedding environmental issues through the plots. His third stand-alone book, Those Shipwreck Kids, has the children discovering a large, abandoned tent in Pelorus Sound, with rusting toys and rotting food, and setting out to discover what happened for it to be deserted in such haste.

Like all the books in his Those Kids series, Jon has drawn from an actual experience like the abandoned tent that his own children once found in Pelorus Sound and used the ‘shipwrecked’ hulk at Saint Omer Bay to weave a fascinating story about children solving mystery while also discovering much about the birdlife and predator eradication in both Sounds. The twenty-minute chapters have been structured to make them suitable for reading aloud by teachers and parents, and the maps and real-life locations all help show what a beautiful set of waterways we have here in central New Zealand.

If there is a book you would like to recommend, then please email communications@pmnz.co.nz