Description
Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry and a member of Glooscap First Nation. Her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, was the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award, the Crime Writers of Canada First Crime Book Award and shortlisted for the Amazon First Book Award and the Atwood Gibson Award. She lives and writes in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia where she is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University. The Birthing Tree is her second novel.
From the award-winning and bestselling author of The Berry Pickers, an unforgettable novel of family, legacy and secrets, following one woman as she confronts buried truths, lost love and the fragile future she alone must protect.
“My mother died pushing me into the world. . . . I don’t know if I saw her face or if she saw mine. Only that, by the first crack of thunder, she was gone.”
So begins the powerful new novel by critically acclaimed, award-winning author Amanda Peters.
In 1955, Aliet’s mother dies in childbirth beneath the birthing tree, a large old oak, where Indigenous women have been giving birth for longer than anyone can remember. Aliet’s grandmother, the local midwife, has assisted in the successful births of babies there for decades. Yet on that fateful day, tragedy strikes, and it’s her own daughter, Maggie, who dies under her care.
After her mother’s death, Aliet is raised by her grandmother and becomes an apprentice to her knowledge of midwifery and Indigenous medicine. At the base of the birthing tree, Aliet becomes the keeper of sacred knowledge, educated so that she may, one day, carry on these traditional practices. Yet, when Aliet grows older, she unexpectedly turns away from her grandmother, her community and all that she’s learned.
Years later, after her grandmother dies, Aliet returns home to a crumbling house and the memories she thought she’d outrun: the love and loss that shaped her young life; the teachings of her grandmother; and the mystery of her own bloodline. She also realizes that to truly start her life over again, she must finally come to terms with a long-held family secret and the unresolved heartbreak and grief of her past.