Waiting for the Long Night Moon - by Amanda Peters (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

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.