The Berry Pickers: A Novel by Amanda Peters (Paperback)

Fiction - Indigenous - Coming of Age - Family Life - Siblings

RELEASE DATE: 10/29/2024

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Winner
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years

"A stunning debut about love, race, brutality, and the balm of forgiveness." —People, A Best New Book

July 1962. Following in the tradition of Indigenous workers from Nova Scotia, a Mi’kmaq family arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

“An unforgettable exploration of grief, love, and kin,” (The Boston Globe), this show stopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time

AUTHOR BIO: 

AMANDA PETERS is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry. Her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, was the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Amazon First Novel Award. Peters is a graduate of the master of fine arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has a certificate in creative writing from the University of Toronto. She lives and writes in the Annapolis Valley Nova Scotia where she is an Associate Professor in English and Theatre at Acadia University.

"A gripping read, a mystery and a moving narrative all in one book." --A New York Post Best Book of the Year

"A lucid and assured debut." -- The New Yorker

"A stunning debut about love, race, brutality and the balm of forgiveness." -- People, A Best New Book

" The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters completely broke my heart because it highlights how a moment, a decision by one person can change the course of another person's life. It has this deep complexity surrounding a well-intentioned woman who acted in an irrational way out of desperation and the book is basically about the impact of her choices." --Jen Psaki, Elle