12/02/2024
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. (Feb.)
An Amazon Best Book of the Month
Ms., A Most Anticipated Title
Kirkus Reviews, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Zibby Media, A Most Anticipated Title for Fall/Winter
"A must-read." —People
"Searing and insightful . . . Don't miss this one." —Karla Strand, Ms.
"One of the best short story collections of 2025 . . . This memorable collection doesn’t shy away from the full spectrum of emotion. At times sad and disturbing, Waiting for the Long Night Moon is always redemptive and unafraid to find the possibilities for joy within a long history of grief." —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"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 . . . Stunning . . . Peters' award-winning debut created an audience ready for anything she writes, and they won't be disappointed by her memorable stories." —Booklist (starred review)
"Peters delivers a skillful set of tales featuring Indigenous characters in contemporary and historical settings . . . 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." —Publishers Weekly
"An impactful collection of short stories . . . 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. An impressive collection rooted in the grief, trauma, tradition, resilience, and hope of Indigenous peoples." —Kirkus Reviews
“Amanda Peters masterfully takes on complex and challenging subjects such as grief, loss, love, rage and resistance with a range of confident prose, from the subtle and understated to the poetic and resonant." —Michelle Good, author of Five Little Indians
“A sharp and compassionate collection that navigates the topographies of loss and resistance, never losing sight of how the land returns our senses, and heals.” —Carleigh Baker, author of Last Woman
"In the follow-up to her debut, national bestselling novel The Berry Pickers, Amanda Peters returns, this time with a collection of stories: Waiting for the Long Night Moon. The stories in this collection captivate with a blend of traditional Indigenous storytelling and Peters’s signature spare, evocative prose. Both heart-wrenching and triumphant, these stories span an astonishingly wide spectrum of the Indigenous experience—from the humiliations of systemic racism to the enduring strength and dignity of Indigenous life. Peters reminds us, time and again, that where there is trauma, there is resilience, where there is grief, there is joy, and where there is loss, there is love and the promise of a future that rises from within the human experience. These are stories at their best, stories that will turn any reader’s preference of the novel to that of the short story form—this is a collection where each short story is its own explosion of the heart that puts itself back together again for the better. Peters has given us a gift, and while it is this book, it her time and energy she spends to create such brilliance on the page." —Morgan Talty, national bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit: A Novel
Megan Tooley and Ussani Taylor deliver moving performances of Amanda Peters's short stories, which explore the Indigenous experience throughout American history. Peters, author of THE BERRY PICKERS, writes about such disparate people as a girl who is witnessing the arrival of the first white settlers and a boy who is struggling in a Christian boarding school. Tooley performs most of the stories, using a sweet lilting voice, gentle delivery, and subtle shading of personality to help listeners delight in a girl's first traditional dance and be brave during a group's environmental protest. Taylor, who reads four deeply moving, emotionally difficult pieces, gives a tough and perceptive performance, lowering his vocal register and flattening his tone to portray Native boys and men hanging tough during systemic injustice. Together, they create an important listening experience. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine
2024-11-09
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.