March 2025: Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers
Fiction readers are just better people because literature is about the human condition; it helps us develop empathy. – Amanda Peters
Episode 47
This month’s JHBC selection, The Berry Pickers, by Nova Scotian author Amanda Peters has found a particularly receptive audience within book club communities, including the Jen Hatmaker Book Club, for exploring universal human emotions and experiences, and for examining unique cultural perspectives. By masterfully blending her father’s compelling stories as a Maine berry picker with her own extensive career in Indigenous governance, The Berry Pickers delves into a unique and original plot surrounding a Mi’kmaw family that grapples with the corrosive effects of guilt and shame, and the possibility of redemption. Peters reveals how the debut novel initially took shape as a short story, but as the beautifully-flawed characters and tendrilled themes began to unfold, the narrative organically expanded into the full-fledged novel that it is now, which has been translated into an impressive 22 languages and has been awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
The Berry Pickers: A Novel by Amanda Peters
Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories by Amanda Peters
Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Pearly Everlasting: A Novel by Tammy Armstrong
All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks
What Strange Paradise: A novel by Omar El Akkad
