Waiting for the Long Night Moon

September 1, 2024

Peters debuted with the bestselling novel The Berry Pickers, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. A writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry, she continues to explore Indigenous experiences in this collection of short stories that portray grief, joy, trauma, and resilience. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from October 15, 2024
Peters shares in her acknowledgments to this short-story collection that she wrote it before her Andrew Carnegie Medal-winning debut novel, The Berry Pickers (2023). She includes a content warning near the start of this book, noting that many of its stories address painful topics. Readers who engage will be well rewarded with a meaningful collection centering Indigenous people. Written in a woven style, integrating past and present, the stories often end at deft, surprising, and important moments. In the first, a woman whose baby died joins a group of water protectors to help make the world better for when the baby returns. In another, a young boy who was left at a religious school with his sister by a mother who loved but couldn't feed them is locked in a cupboard for asking a question. Another story introduces a woman wanting to get off drugs and return to her mother, who made her walk in the forest to always remember city isn't home, but a violent man wants her to stay. Braided through the longer pieces, like the sweetgrass featured in one, are shorter works focusing on an image, element of culture, or moment. Joy too is sliced throughout Peters' stunning stories.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Peters' award-winning debut created an audience ready for anything she writes, and they won't be disappointed by her memorable stories.

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December 2, 2024
Canadian writer Peters (The Berry Pickers) delivers a skillful set of tales featuring Indigenous characters in contemporary and historical settings. The narrator of “(Winter Arrives)”
describes the seasonal return of white colonists to her riverside land. Though her father assures her that the colonists’ stay will be short (“Each year they come, little one. They come and they leave”), the narrator has her doubts. “Tiny Birds and Terrorists” centers on an encampment of activists, who are called “terrorists” on the evening news for attempting to protect their natural resources. One of them, a 16-year-old girl who skips school to join the group, is later cautioned by her mother against becoming a “rez bum.” Peters draws on oral history with “The Story of the Crow (A Retelling),” which details how the crow became black and hoarse. “In the Name of God” chronicles a boy’s harrowing experience at a Catholic residential school, where a priest locks him in a cupboard for four days as punishment for insubordination. Peters casts an unflinching eye on the suffering of her characters, resulting in the heightened emotions of stories like “Three Billion Heartbeats,” in which a young woman leaves home for the city to score drugs
and faces mortal danger. It’s an affecting and wide-ranging collection. Agent: Marilyn Biderman, Transatlantic Agency.

December 15, 2024
Seventeen stories that explore the joy and sorrow of the Indigenous experience. Peters, winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for her debut, The Berry Pickers (2023), returns with an impactful collection of short stories. The book opens with "(Winter Arrives)," which chronicles the arrival of the "pale ones" to Indigenous shores. The unnamed narrator's father tells them that the "pale-faced" people will leave like they have in the past, but the narrator is less sure: "I think they may stay." The devastating consequences of colonization--especially as it relates to the violent destruction of Indigenous families--are explored in the stories that follow. "In the Name of God" follows a pair of siblings as they navigate the horrifying reality of growing up in a residential school meant to strip them of their language, religion, and culture. In "Three Billion Heartbeats," a mother-daughter relationship breaks under the weight of the younger woman's abusive relationship. Before her daughter left for the city to study, her fearful mother told her not to forget that she is "a woman of the land. A woman of the trees and the lake, you belong to the grass." The essential connection between the Indigenous characters and nature echoes throughout the collection. In "Tiny Birds and Terrorists," a grieving mother becomes a water protector. When the local paper calls them "a ragged band of eco-terrorists," another protector says the term is used to make white people afraid of people like them: "People who know we need the earth more than it needs us." Many of the stories deal with grief--both spoken and unspoken; personal and generational; physical and spiritual--and how to survive in a world that's trying to erase you. If some of the stories feel less robust than others, Peters' sparse and striking prose more than makes up for it. An impressive collection rooted in the grief, trauma, tradition, resilience, and hope of Indigenous peoples.

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