Berry Pickers

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.

Story Locale:Maine

2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Winner
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Finalist for the Clara Johnson Award A Sarah Selects Book Club Pick

Named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, Apple, People, Barnes & Noble, The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, CrimeReads, Booklist, Debutiful, and more

"A harrowing tale of Indigenous family separation . . . [Peters] excels in writing characters for whom we can’t help rooting . . . With The Berry Pickers, Peters takes on the monumental task of giving witness to people who suffered through racist attempts of erasure like her Mi’kmaw ancestors. 'White folks been trying to take the Indian out of us for centuries,' a character tells Norma. 'But now that you know, you gotta let people know.' Peters is letting people know." —Eric Nguyen, The New York Times Book Review 

"The strength of Amanda Peters’s novel lies in its understanding of how trauma spreads through a life and a family, and its depiction of the challenges facing Indigenous people . . . [A] powerful message about truth, forgiveness and healing." —Marion Winik, The Washington Post

"The Berry Pickers offers an unforgettable exploration of grief, love, and kin." —Jenny Bartoy, The Boston Globe

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.

Author Residence: Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, Canada
Author Hometown: Middleton, Nova Scotia, Canada