Berry Pickers

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

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

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping 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

"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." —The New York Times Book Review