In Heart Berries, Mailhot discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, re-establishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world. Memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination. 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. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalised and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. Terese Marie Mailhot honours her mothers story in Heart Berries 17 Canadian books to read for World Mental Health Day 35 books to read for National Indigenous History Month Terese Marie.

'The stories I wrote about him always had murky endings, where you could tell the protagonist had unfinished business with him, and that she had been hurt,' she said.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the Whiting Award for Non-Fiction Selected by Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick 'I loved it' Kate Tempest 'Astounding' Roxane Gay 'A sledgehammer' New York Times Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on an Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. When Terese Marie Mailhot first started taking creative writing classes, she tried turning her relationship with her father into fiction.

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