About this Event
The Indigenous Voices Book Club is devoted to reading and discussing books by Indigenous writers, bringing together fiction, memoir, history, poetry, and more. Each month, we'll encounter stories and perspectives that deepen our understanding of Indigenous experiences, histories, cultures, and contemporary life.
This month, we're reading Amanda Peters's The Berry Pickers—a moving family story that begins in the blueberry fields of Maine in 1962, when a four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl disappears. Every summer, the Paul family travels from Nova Scotia to Maine for the berry harvest, but after young Ruthie vanishes without a trace, they return home without her. Her brother Joe carries the loss—and his guilt—well into adulthood. In another part of Maine, a girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent but deeply overprotective mother, troubled by recurring dreams and the feeling that something about her family's story doesn't quite add up. Moving between Joe and Norma across decades, Peters gradually brings their lives together in a novel about the long reach of a single loss. Tender without being sentimental, The Berry Pickers explores family, identity, belonging, and the stories we inherit about who we are—and what happens when those stories begin to come apart.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
AMANDA PETERS is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry. Her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, won the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers Award. The novel was also named the Best Book of the Year by Amazon, The New Yorker, and People Magazine, among others. The title story from her short story collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose. She lives in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia.
Event venue & nearby stays
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United States
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