Amanda Peters

A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and will remain unsolved for nearly fifty years 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 Novel

The Berry Pickers

Cassidy Nolan

I sit with my back to the wall, my pillows flat.

The white folks at the store where we got our supplies said that Indians made such good berry pickers because something sour in our blood kept the blackflies away. But even then, as a boy of six, I knew that wasn’t true.

My mother, through no fault of her own, had come to love the church, the elaborate ceremonies replacing the ones torn from her heart during a childhood she rarely mentioned.

It’s funny what you remember when something goes wrong. Something that would never stick in your memory on an ordinary day gets stuck there permanent.

I sat and listened, thinking that Mom would be better if it’d been me and not Ruthie that disappeared. She had three boys and only two girls. I was the youngest boy and one that could be spared.

No one spoke about her, but when we passed the small stone where I saw her last, a sandwich in her hand, I just knew that we were leaving Ruthie behind.

“We moved, sweetheart. You’re just remembering the old house. That’s all.” She always had a way of making me feel silly for saying these things. Silly when I was young, but guilty the older I got.

If my mother did anything exceptionally well, it was guilt.

“Remember she does everything she does out of love. Misguided maybe, but full up to the top with love.”

The Berry Pickers quotes

Join the club