Transatlantic is proud to announce that THE BERRY PICKERS by Amanda Peters has been shortlisted for the 48th annual Amazon Canada First Novel Award!
Established in 1976, the First Novel Award program has launched the careers of some of Canada’s most prestigious authors. Previous winners include Michael Ondaatje, Joan Barfoot, Joy Kogawa, W. P. Kinsella, Nino Ricci, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Redhill, Mona Awad, Katherena Vermette, Casey Plett, Michelle Good, and last year’s winner, Pik-Shuen Fung.
Billy-Ray Belcourt, 2024 Adult First Novel Category Judge says, “These six books offer a panoramic view of the novel in twenty-first century Canada. They are searching, formally interesting works concerned with questions of power and survival and history (among others), but they are written in unique and beautiful idioms that suggest fiction in this country is in incredibly capable hands. It was an honor to immerse myself in each of them.”
The winner of the Adult First Novel category will receive $60,000, and each of the five finalists will receive $6,000 in prize money. The winner will be announced in Toronto on Thursday, June 6, 2024.
About THE BERRY PICKERS:
A four-year-old girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that remains 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, is seen sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of a field before mysteriously vanishing. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, who was the last person to see Ruthie, is devastated by his sister’s disappearance, and her loss ripples through his life for years to come.
In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as an only child in an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, while her mother is overprotective of Norma, who is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem to be too real to be her imagination. As she grows older, Norma senses there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she pursues her family’s secret for decades.
A stunning debut novel, The Berry Pickers is a riveting story about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.
Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry. Her work has appeared in the Antigonish Review, Grain Magazine, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Dalhousie Review, and Filling Station Magazine. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers’ Trust Rising Stars program. A graduate of the Master of Fine Arts Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Amanda Peters has a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, and currently teaches at Acadia University. She lives in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, with her fur babies, Holly and Pook.
Amanda is represented by Marilyn Biderman.
Congratulations!