For the past twelve years, a community of Anishinaabe people have made the Northern Ontario bush their home in the wake of the infrastructural power failure that brought about governmental and societal collapse. Hunters and harvesters, they have survived and thrived the way their ancestors once did, but their natural food resources are dwindling, and the time has come to find a new home.

Evan Whitesky volunteers to lead a dangerous mission south to explore the possibility of moving back to their ancestral home, the "land where the birch trees grow by the big water" in the Great Lakes region. Accompanied by five others, including his daughter Nangohns, a great archer and hunter, Evan begins a journey that will take him through the reserve where the Anishinaabe were once settled, the devastated city of Gibson, and a land now being reclaimed by nature.

But it isn't just the wilderness that poses a threat as they encounter other survivors. Those who, like the Anishinaabe, live in harmony with the land. And those who use violence to fulfill their needs.

Waubgeshig Rice is an Anishinaabe author, journalist and radio host originally from Wasauksing First Nation. Rice's first short story collection Midnight Sweatlodge, which was about his life growing up in his Anishinaabe community, won an Independent Publishers Book Award in 2012. Moon of the Turning Leaves is the Sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow, which was on the Canada Reads 2023 longlist.