berry pickers

Author Name: Amanda Peters

A national bestseller, winner of the 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in the Art of Fiction.

A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl gets lost in the blueberry fields of Maine, setting in motion a mystery that will tear a family apart for fifty years.

“A harrowing tale of a Native American family’s separation... In The Berry Pickers, Peters takes on the great challenge of documenting the suffering of her Mi’kmaq people, who, like their ancestors, have been subjected to racist attempts to erase their existence.” - New York Times Book Review

In the summer of 1962, a Mi'kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to work as raspberries. A few weeks later, the youngest member, four-year-old Ruthie, disappears. She was last seen sitting on a rock at the edge of a raspberry field next to her six-year-old brother, Joe. Joe would live with the turmoil of losing his sister for the rest of his life. Elsewhere in Maine, an only child named Norma was being raised by well-off parents. Her father was emotionally distant, and her mother was overprotective. Norma experienced disturbing dreams and visions that seemed more like hazy memories than fleeting imaginations. As the years passed, she slowly discovered that there was a hidden family secret. Clinging to her intuition, she devoted decades of her life to trying to unravel this deeply buried mystery.