The Berry Pickers
In 1962, a Mi'kmaq family from Nova Scotia drives down to Maine for the blueberry harvest. Four-year-old Ruthie sits on a flat rock at the edge of a field, and when her older brother Joe looks up, she is gone. The book splits across fifty years and two voices. Joe carries the guilt and watches the family unravel through addiction, prison, and silence. Norma grows up in a Maine suburb with a controlling adoptive mother and a sense she cannot place that her childhood is built on a hidden lie. Amanda Peters writes the slow recognition with restraint, refusing to telegraph the reveal even as the reader sees it coming.
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A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl vanishes from a Maine blueberry field in 1962, and the family secret takes fifty years to surface in this 2023 Carnegie Medal winner.
The Berry Pickers was written by Amanda Peters and published in 2023. Peters is a Mi'kmaq and settler writer; the novel draws on the experience of Indigenous migrant workers in Maine berry fields.
Yes. The Berry Pickers won the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was Amanda Peters's debut novel.
The Berry Pickers is 451 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Berry Pickers takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Berry Pickers is a standalone novel by Amanda Peters, not part of a series.
The Berry Pickers is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.