Book Summary and Reviews of Waiting for the Long Night Moon by Amanda Peters

Waiting for the Long Night Moon by Amanda Peters

Waiting for the Long Night Moon

Stories

by Amanda Peters

  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Published:
  • Feb 2025, 256 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the bestselling author of The Berry Pickers.

In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place—from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water.

In this intimate collection, Amanda Peters melds traditional storytelling with beautiful, spare prose to describe the dignity of the traditional way of life, the humiliations of systemic racism and the resilient power to endure. A young man returns from residential school only to realize he can no longer communicate with his own parents. A grieving mother finds purpose and healing on the front lines as a water protector. And a nervous child dances in her first Mawi'omi. The collection also includes the Indigenous Voices Award-winning and title story "Waiting for the Long Night Moon."

At times sad, sometimes disturbing but always redemptive, the stories in Waiting for the Long Night Moon will remind you that where there is grief there is also joy, where there is trauma there is resilience and, most importantly, there is power.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"An impressive collection rooted in the grief, trauma, tradition, resilience, and hope of Indigenous peoples." —Kirkus Reviews

"In these 17 stories from Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers, it's easy to appreciate her characters' pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world." —BookPage

"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

This information about Waiting for the Long Night Moon was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Amanda Peters

Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry. Her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, was the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Amazon First Novel Award. Peters is a graduate of the master of fine arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has a certificate in creative writing from the University of Toronto. She lives and writes in the Annapolis Valley Nova Scotia where she is an Associate Professor in English and Theatre at Acadia University.

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Read-Alikes

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