Cherry
A novel
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3.9 • 13 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
National Bestseller
Now a major motion picture starring Tom Holland and directed by the Russo Brothers. A young medic returns from deployment in Iraq to two things: the woman he loves, and the opioid crisis sweeping across the Midwest.
In this “miracle of literary serendipity” (The Washington Post), after finding himself deep in the thrall of heroin addiction, the soldier arrives at what seems like the only logical solution: robbing banks.
Written by a singularly talented, wildly imaginative debut novelist, Cherry is a bracingly funny and unexpectedly tender work of fiction straight from the dark heart of America.
A PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FINALIST
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER • ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY • VULTURE • VOGUE • LIT HUB
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Cherry has the makings of a cult classic: an unfiltered, unforgettable voice and a complete disregard for taboo and good manners. Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel follows an unnamed college dropout who joins the military, leaving behind his enigmatic girlfriend, Emily. After “playing a soldier,” Walker’s hero comes home to Emily, but PTSD and other pressures push the couple ever deeper into heroin addiction. To support their habit, the book’s self-described “scumbag” narrator starts robbing banks. Darkly funny and gut-wrenchingly raw, Cherry makes Walker part of a swaggering tradition of literary bad boys including Hubert Selby Jr., Hunter S. Thompson, Irvine Welsh, and Denis Johnson.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A man who likens himself to a "stray dog with the mange" descends into addiction in this frustrating debut. Walker's unnamed narrator begins the novel as "a soft kid" from a stable home, a vegetarian shoe store employee dating a college classmate named Emily who likes Modest Mouse and Edward Albee. But when Emily transfers, he fails out of school and enlists in the Army as a medic, reasoning "I don't have any other ideas." He wastes time in Iraq "waiting for the war to happen" and grows further apart from Emily. Upon returning home to Cleveland, the narrator starts "getting into the OxyContin pretty hard." He traipses through a parade of new women before Emily reenters the picture, having started using drugs herself. "There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin," the narrator writes. Some readers may find the innumerable descriptions of the Sisyphean life of an addict suitably transgressive. For everyone else, the insistence on Emily's culpability for the narrator's degeneration, as well as the depiction of other women as useful only for sex, make the novel feel like it's willing to describe the catastrophe of its narrator's life, but not truly examine it.
