Plunder: A Pirate Novel

by Carole DeSanti

A three-hundred-year-old manuscript, audacious female pirates in their own words, and a modern-day ghost writer on the brink of From these threads comes an epic story of reckoning and defiance for a group of women linked across hundreds of years.

South Coast, Jamaica. The Present. Kath Selkirk is the voice behind one of the most successful memoirists of the last decade. On a research trip to Jamaica for her next project, Kath discovers what appears to be a first-person account of the notorious pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, whose legendary adventures have never been documented in such close detail. Consumed by the pages, persuaded of their priceless authenticity, and inadvertently raising the curiosity of unscrupulous treasure hunters who well understand the value of this astonishing discovery, she’s left with burning How did this mysterious book come to be written? How had it been lost? And, as Kath excavates the truth plundered from her own past, how has this story found her once again? 

Nassau, Bahamas, 1718. Bonny and Read meet, soon to join Captain Jack Rackham’s ship, the Swift, at his Cuban redoubt.  So commences the tale of the defiant pair who navigated a perilous world of love, loot, rage, and retribution -- that is, until they were captured, imprisoned in Jamaica, and sentenced to death.

Inspired by the remarkable and elusive Bonny and Read, who have excited curiosity for centuries, Plunder is a novel told across time in a place of wild and eerie beauty, as a group of bold souls summon grit and resilience to avenge past wrongs and chart their courses ahead.

480 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication June 1, 2027

About the author

Carole DeSanti is a longtime book editor and champion of new voices in fiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and the Women's Review of Books.