Transatlantic is proud to announce that Amanda Peters’ THE BERRY PICKERS (Catapult) has won the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction!
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence, established in 2012, recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year and serve as a guide to help adults select quality reading material. They are the first single-book awards for adult books given by the American Library Association and reflect the expert judgment and insight of library professionals who work closely with adult readers. The winners (one for fiction, one for nonfiction) are announced at an event at LibLearnX; winning authors receive a $5,000 cash award.
Learn more about this years awards here: https://www.ala.org/rusa/awards/carnegie-medals/2024-winners
About THE BERRY PICKERS:
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
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.
THE BERRY PICKERS was also the Winner of the 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, a Finalist for Barnes & Noble Book of the Year 2023, Nominated for the 2024 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award, a Finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Prize (Writers Trust Awards), a New Yorker Best Books of 2023, and so much more!
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 Amanda!