Join us in an online conversation with acclaimed writer Amanda Peters as we discuss her instant bestselling novel, The Berry Pickers, as well as her tender short fiction collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories.
Influenced by Peters’ own Mi’kmaq heritage, The Berry Pickers is a riveting exploration of family, grief, and the bonds we share.
July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia 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.
The Berry Pickers is an intimate portrait of race, love, and loneliness–and the power of forgiveness. Register now to take part in the discussion!
About the Author: Amanda Peters is a mixed-race woman of Mi’kmaq and European ancestry, born and raised in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Antigonish Review, Grain Magazine, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Dalhousie Review, and Filling Station Magazine.
Amanda’s first novel, The Berry Pickers, was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in Canada, and won the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in the US. The Berry Pickers won the Dartmouth Book Award and the Crime Writers of Canada First Crime Novel Award, and has been translated into sixteen languages around the world. Her most recent book of short fiction, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, was published August, 2024, to critical acclaim.
This program is sponsored by the Alexandria Library Foundation.
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