Get a free audiobook
-
Heart Berries
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Rainy Fields
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
- Categories: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government
People who bought this also bought...
-
There There
- A Novel
- Written by: Tommy Orange
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Ceurvo, and others
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.
-
-
Loved it!
- By Anonymous User on 2020-07-13
-
The Flying Troutmans
- Written by: Miriam Toews
- Narrated by: Amy Rutherford
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Days after being dumped by her boyfriend Marc in Paris - "he was heading off to an ashram and said we could communicate telepathically" - Hattie hears her sister Min has been checked into a psychiatric hospital, and finds herself flying back to Winnipeg to take care of Thebes and Logan, her niece and nephew. Not knowing what else to do, they set out on a road trip in search of the children's long-lost father, Cherkis. On their wayward journey, the Troutmans stay at scary motels, meet helpful hippies, and try to ignore the threatening noises coming from under the hood of their van.
-
-
fantastic!
- By Robin Chamberlain on 2020-08-29
-
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
- Written by: Alicia Elliott
- Narrated by: Alicia Elliott
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrifcation, writing, and representation.
-
-
Profoundly vulnerable and robustly analytical
- By Anonymous User on 2019-04-07
-
A History of My Brief Body
- Written by: Billy-Ray Belcourt
- Narrated by: Billy-Ray Belcourt
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve.
-
The Prophets
- Written by: Robert Jones Jr.
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man - a fellow slave - seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own.
-
The Break
- Written by: Katherena Vermette
- Narrated by: Michaela Washburn
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break - a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house - she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime. In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim - police, family, and friends - tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night.
-
-
Every Canadian must read
- By Anonymous User on 2018-03-20
-
There There
- A Novel
- Written by: Tommy Orange
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Ceurvo, and others
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.
-
-
Loved it!
- By Anonymous User on 2020-07-13
-
The Flying Troutmans
- Written by: Miriam Toews
- Narrated by: Amy Rutherford
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Days after being dumped by her boyfriend Marc in Paris - "he was heading off to an ashram and said we could communicate telepathically" - Hattie hears her sister Min has been checked into a psychiatric hospital, and finds herself flying back to Winnipeg to take care of Thebes and Logan, her niece and nephew. Not knowing what else to do, they set out on a road trip in search of the children's long-lost father, Cherkis. On their wayward journey, the Troutmans stay at scary motels, meet helpful hippies, and try to ignore the threatening noises coming from under the hood of their van.
-
-
fantastic!
- By Robin Chamberlain on 2020-08-29
-
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
- Written by: Alicia Elliott
- Narrated by: Alicia Elliott
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrifcation, writing, and representation.
-
-
Profoundly vulnerable and robustly analytical
- By Anonymous User on 2019-04-07
-
A History of My Brief Body
- Written by: Billy-Ray Belcourt
- Narrated by: Billy-Ray Belcourt
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve.
-
The Prophets
- Written by: Robert Jones Jr.
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man - a fellow slave - seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own.
-
The Break
- Written by: Katherena Vermette
- Narrated by: Michaela Washburn
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break - a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house - she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime. In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim - police, family, and friends - tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night.
-
-
Every Canadian must read
- By Anonymous User on 2018-03-20
-
All Our Relations
- Finding the Path Forward
- Written by: Tanya Talaga
- Narrated by: Tanya Talaga
- Length: 5 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tanya Talaga, the best-selling author of Seven Fallen Feathers and the 2017-2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, calls attention to an urgent global humanitarian crisis among Indigenous Peoples - youth suicide.
-
-
A true guide to knowing more
- By Magalie on 2020-01-26
-
21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act
- Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality
- Written by: Bob Joseph
- Narrated by: Sage Isaac
- Length: 3 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on a viral article, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act is the essential guide to understanding the legal document and its repercussion on generations of Indigenous peoples, written by a leading cultural sensitivity trainer. The Indian Act, after 141 years, continues to shape, control, and constrain the lives and opportunities of Indigenous peoples, and is at the root of many lasting stereotypes.
-
-
Essentially Canadian - Must Read.
- By Marcel Molin on 2019-08-23
-
Jonny Appleseed
- A Novel
- Written by: Joshua Whitehead
- Narrated by: Joshua Whitehead
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A tour-de-force debut novel about a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer young man and proud NDN glitter princess who must reckon with his past when he returns home to his reserve. “You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine” is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling debut novel by poet Joshua Whitehead.
-
-
raw and emotional
- By Kim on 2021-02-25
-
Islands of Decolonial Love
- Stories & Songs
- Written by: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- Narrated by: Tantoo Cardinal
- Length: 3 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her debut collection of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love, renowned writer and activist Leanne Simpson vividly explores the lives of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and communities, especially those of her own Nishnaabeg nation. Found on reserves, in cities and small towns, in bars and curling rinks, canoes and community centres, doctors offices and pickup trucks, Simpson's characters confront the often heartbreaking challenge of pairing the desire to live loving and observant lives with a constant struggle to simply survive....
-
-
Chi meegwetch
- By ruth kenny on 2020-07-22
-
Trickster Drift
- Written by: Eden Robinson
- Narrated by: Jason Ryll
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an effort to keep all forms of magic at bay, Jared, 17, has quit drugs and drinking. But his troubles are not over: now he's being stalked by David, his mom's ex - a preppy, khaki-wearing psycho with a proclivity for rib-breaking. And his mother, Maggie, a living, breathing badass as well as a witch, can't protect him like she used to because he's moved away from Kitimat to Vancouver for school. Even though he's got a year of sobriety under his belt (no thanks to his enabling, ever-partying mom), Jared also struggles with the temptation of drinking.
-
-
Great improvement by the narrator
- By Anonymous User on 2020-02-17
-
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
- A Memoir
- Written by: T Kira Madden
- Narrated by: T Kira Madden
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cultlike privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.
-
-
A great story about what it means to be family
- By S. Watson on 2020-02-03
-
Starlight
- Written by: Richard Wagamese
- Narrated by: Wesley French
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The final novel from Richard Wagamese, the best-selling and beloved author of Indian Horse and Medicine Walk, centres on an abused woman on the run who finds refuge on a farm owned by an Indigenous man with wounds of his own. A profoundly moving novel about the redemptive power of love, mercy, and compassion - and the land's ability to heal us.
-
-
Didn't want it to end - and it didn't
- By Anonymous User on 2019-04-01
-
The Push
- A Novel
- Written by: Ashley Audrain
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby, Violet, that she herself never had. But in the thick of motherhood's exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter - she doesn't behave like most children do. Or is it all in Blythe's head? Her husband, Fox, says she's imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well.
-
-
Slow and depressing
- By Jennifer on 2021-01-14
-
Feminism Is for Everybody
- Passionate Politics
- Written by: bell hooks
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, Bell Hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, Hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives - to see that feminism is for everybody.
-
-
Fight The Power
- By Hmackdad on 2020-02-05
-
The Mercies
- Written by: Kirin Millwood Hargrave
- Narrated by: Jessie Buckley
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardø must fend for themselves. Three years later, a stranger arrives on their shore. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa.
-
-
Depressing and sad
- By MH on 2020-09-17
-
Transgender History, Second Edition
- The Roots of Today's Revolution
- Written by: Susan Stryker
- Narrated by: Emily Cauldwell
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Covering American transgender history from the mid-20th century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events.
-
Son of a Trickster
- Written by: Eden Robinson
- Narrated by: Jason Ryll
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Everyone knows a guy like Jared: the burnout kid in high school who sells weed cookies and has a scary mom who's often wasted and wielding some kind of weapon. Jared does smoke and drink too much, and he does make the best cookies in town, and his mom is a mess, but he's also a kid who has an immense capacity for compassion and an impulse to watch over people more than twice his age, and he can't rely on anyone for consistent love and support, except for his flatulent pit bull, Baby Killer (he calls her Baby) - and now she's dead.
-
-
Excellent Story
- By sannna on 2017-12-18
Publisher's Summary
Canada Reads 2019 longlist.
National best seller.
New York Times best seller.
Finalist for the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Awards.
Longlisted for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize.
Winner of the Blue Metropolis First Peoples Prize.
Winner of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature.
Winner of the 2019 Whiting Award for Nonfiction.
A New York Times Editor's Choice.
Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.
A Globe and Mail best book of 2018.
Shortlisted for the 2019 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction.
A New York Times Editor's Choice.
A Globe and Mail best book of 2018.
A CBC best book of 2018.
A Toronto Star best book of 2018.
A Walrus best book of 2018.
An NPR best book of 2018.
A Chatelaine best book of 2018.
A Bustle best book of 2018.
A GQ best book of 2018.
A Thrillist best book of 2018.
A Book Riot best book of 2018.
An Electric Lit best book of 2018.
An Entropy best book of 2018.
A Hill Times best book of 2018.
A BookPage best book of 2018.
A Library Journal best book of 2018.
A Goodreads best book of 2018.
A New York Public Library best book of 2018.
Named one of the most anticipated books of 2018 by: Chatelaine, Entertainment Weekly, ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Huffington Post, B*tch, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Bustle, The Rumpus, and Goodreads.
Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018.
Guileless and refreshingly honest, Terese Mailhot's debut memoir chronicles her struggle to balance the beauty of her Native heritage with the often desperate and chaotic reality of life on the reservation.
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II, Terese Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father - an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist - who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.
Mailhot "trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain and what we can bring ourselves to accept." Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.
What the critics say
"Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot is an astounding memoir in essays. Here, is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman, towering in words great and small. She writes of motherhood, loss, absence, want, suffering, love, mental illness, betrayal and survival. She does this without blinking but to say she is fearless would be to miss the point. These essays are too intimate, too absorbing, too beautifully written, but never ever too much. What Mailhot has accomplished in this exquisite book is brilliance both raw and refined, testament." (Roxane Gay)
"I am quietly reveling in the profundity of Mailhot’s deliberate transgression in Heart Berries and its perfect results. I love her suspicion of words. I have always been terrified and in awe of the power of words - but Mailhot does not let them silence her in Heart Berries. She finds the purest way to say what she needs to say.... [T]he writing is so good it’s hard not to temporarily be distracted from the content or narrative by its brilliance.... Perhaps, because this author so generously allows us to be her witness, we are somehow able to see ourselves more clearly and become better witnesses to ourselves." (Emma Watson, official March/April selection for Our Shared Shelf)
"Heart Berries is a sledgehammer...a mixture of vulnerability and rage, sexual yearning and artistic ambition, swagger and self-mockery.... Her experiments with structure and language...are in the service of trying to find new ways to think about the past, trauma, repetition and reconciliation, which might be a way of saying a new model for the memoir." (The New York Times)
Related Collections
More from the same
Narrator:
What listeners say about Heart Berries
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Claudia
- 2019-05-01
Gorgeously brutal
Untangling in a way I didn't know I was craving. Words are limited to express how I stopped in my tracks a few sentences in, witnessing how even the shortest sentences pack the most long-lasting punches. The narration is spectacular. Raw, strong yet in a way that pulls you in the most vulnerable moments of a woman's life. A match made in heaven.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
- Amazon Customer
- 2019-02-05
Good read
Raw, perhaps reminiscent of Margaret Lawrence's, Pique - in The Diviners. Really enjoyed this book.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Frances Jones
- 2019-08-04
Boring and self indulgent
Hmm... let’s see ... how can I tell my story is the most obtuse monotonous boring way possible. Oh I know, I will write this book.