Invoking deep histories of hardship and inherited family legacies, Amanda Peters’s sophomore novel is at home in the postmodern literary tradition of the East Coast. Less gothic-adjacent than some regional stories, The Birthing Tree elicits a nostalgic, almost cozy atmosphere from the potentially hostile setting – Mi’kma’ki, rural Nova Scotia, during the shifting racial politics of the 1960s and the pre-smartphone 1990s, when you had to visit a library to update your résumé or learn how to fix a window. But what really makes this novel stand out is the way Peters centres the Indigenous histories of the territory that go back “longer than there [is] memory.” At the heart of this narrative is the enduring practice of midwifery and the challenges faced by women who labour to keep vital Mi’kmaw birth teachings alive.

Aliet Paul, who narrates her past from an indeterminate present, is the “only daughter of an only daughter of an only daughter.” She’s raised by her grandmother, Kiju, after her mother dies giving birth to her under the birthing tree: a sacred place that stands a short walk from the “starter” home her grandfather built before his death overseas, and where Aliet helps Kiju deliver babies in the traditional way of the Mi’kmaq.

Aliet’s adolescent life in the ’60s is a mostly happy one. Her relations are few but significant, and include the apple pickers: a group of seasonal workers that camp in Kiju’s field every fall and who’ve become like family. When she is among the apple pickers – many of whom knew the mother she can’t remember, one of whom she hopes might be her father – Aliet’s yearning for ancestral connection is both sated and intensified.

But in the ’90s, her adult life as a nurse in the city is unmoored and lonely. When Kiju dies, Aliet is drawn back to the childhood home she’d neglected, to the people who shaped her, and to the birthing tree, which she’s devastated to discover has become a teenage drinking spot.

Aliet’s story – experiencing great love and the lacklustre connections in its wake, negotiating identity and injustice, confronting trauma so it doesn’t fester, and reigniting dormant purpose – plays out between the two decades, which unfold in tandem.

The suspense built between these timelines is often thick with mystery, flashes of memory surfacing as Aliet’s senses are triggered. At times, though, it feels like Aliet as the narrator  insincerely withholds information in service to the plot, while conversely deflating tension with excess foreshadowing, inserting prescient observations that reveal more than is necessary.

Regardless, Aliet is a remarkably authentic character. The emotional responses stirred up by her, Kiju, and the supporting matriarchs had me in tears just eight pages in, and every 20 pages after that. I credit this to Peters’s earnest, immersive, scenic writing. The way she captures the waffling precociousness of young Aliet as she comes of age is particularly exceptional. When Aliet expresses hurt and frustration at the way she’s treated because she is a mixed, light-skinned Indigenous person, or stands up for herself when even those she trusts most perceive a moral shortcoming in her that doesn’t necessarily exist, it feels like a gesture of solidarity with the novel’s varied community of Indigenous readers – myself included.

Considering the setting, passing details, and themes they have in common, it seems The Birthing Tree shares a compelling universe with Peters’s highly regarded debut, The Berry Pickers. I hope she’ll continue to populate this world with powerful characters and too-long-overlooked stories.