Description:

Cleveland, Ohio, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily. They share a passion for Edward Albee and ecstasy and fall hard and fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school and joins the army. Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him. His fellow soldiers smoke; they huff computer duster; they take painkillers; they watch porn. And many of them die. He and Emily try to make their long-distance marriage work, but when he returns from Iraq, his PTSD is profound, and the drugs on the street have changed. The opioid crisis is beginning to swallow up the Midwest. Soon he is hooked on heroin, and so is Emily. They attempt a normal life, but with their money drying up, he turns to the one thing he thinks he could be really good at – robbing banks.

Hammered out on a prison typewriter, Cherry marks the arrival of a raw, bleakly hilarious, and surprisingly poignant voice straight from the dark heart of America.

**

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of August 2018: Cherry by Nico Walker is a mesmerizingly dark, comic, often drug-fueled ride through war, romance and bank heists. You’ll laugh out loud, your mind will bend to understand the gritty, ceaseless pressure of being an Army medic in Iraq, and your stomach will hurt with the pain of PTSD and what drugs can do to a body and a mind. Nico Walker is a gifted, unrelenting storyteller and his debut calls to mind the raw and wrecked characters of Denis Johnson and the devastatingly necessary post-war stories of Phil Klay. While at times bleak, this is a novel of our time, a story about a Midwestern boy who falls in love, enlists in the Army (because school is not for him and what else is he going to do), returns from war and falls prey to the escapes of heroin. An explosively cutting and page-turning debut. --Al Woodworth

Review

“Cherry is a miracle of literary serendipity, a triumph. . . . [Walker’s] language, relentlessly profane but never angry, simmers at the level of morose disappointment, something like Holden Caulfield Goes to War. . . . His prose echoes Ernest Hemingway’s cadences to powerful effect. . . . Cherry is written without an ounce of self-pity by an author allergic to the meretricious poetry of despair. In these propulsive pages, Walker draws us right into the mind of an ordinary young man beset by his own and his country’s demons. In the end, his only weapon against disintegration is his own devastating candor.” —The Washington Post

“The rare work of literary fiction by a young American that carries with it nothing of the scent of an MFA program. . . . The voice Walker has fashioned has a lot in common with the one Denis Johnson conjured for his masterpiece Jesus’ Son. . . . A novel of searing beauty.” —*Vulture

“A raw coming-of-age story in reverse. . . . Cherry touches on some of the darkest chapters of recent American history.” —The New York Times*

“One of the summer’s most exciting literary breakthroughs, Cherry is a profane, raw, and harrowingly timely account of the effects of war and the perils of addiction.” —Entertainment Weekly

"A buzzsaw of a novel. . . . Bracingly original." —The Wall Street Journal

“Walker tells the story in a biting staccato, by turns shrewd, heartfelt, and repellent. . . . Cherry's descriptions of Army life are as acerbic and unsparing—and often darkly hilarious—as the boot-camp scenes from Full Metal Jacket.” —*Mother Jones

“Walker’s raw confessional novel, aptly compared to Jesus’ Son and Reservoir Dogs, is a devastating example of art imitating life.” —Esquire*, “The Best Books of 2018 (So Far)” 

“Heavily indebted to the profane blood, guts, bullets, and opiate-strewn absurdities dreamed up by Thomas McGuane, Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah, Cherry tells a story that feels infinitely more real, and undeniably tougher than the rest.” —The A.V. Club

“With an unforgettable voice, the narrator relates his hellacious military service in Iraq, PTSD, and descent into addiction with desperation and propulsive intensity, sustained by a dark humor and associative structure evocative of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.” —The National Book Review

“Unsparingly raw and utterly gripping. This is an astonishingly good novel, written by someone who clearly has a gift for storytelling. Walker’s characters, even minor players and walk-ons, are beautifully drawn. His dialogue rings achingly true. . . . A masterpiece.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Nico Walker’s Cherry is a wrenching, clear-eyed stare-down into the abyss of war, addiction and crime, a dark tumble into scumbaggery, but it’s also deeply humane and truly funny. That is one of the reasons I love it so much: it makes you laugh and ache at the same time, in the manner of the great Denis Johnson.” —Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

“After page one, only the faint hearted will manage to put down this brilliant screech from a life of war, crime and addiction, a powerful book that declares the arrival of a real writer who has made art out of anguish.” —Thomas McGuane, author of Cloudbursts and *Ninety-two in the Shade

“Heartbreaking, unadorned, radically absent of pretense, Cherry is the debut novel America needs now, a letter from the frontlines of opioid addiction and, almost subliminally, a war story.” —Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days and Red, White, Blue

“I’m so jealous about the writing in Cherry that it makes me sick. Nico Walker has written one of those perfect books in the most outrageous voice that I’ve come across in years. Wild and vulnerable and just talking to you in crystal perfect sentences. In a world of literary fakes and watered-down student voices, Nico Walker is like a new-found oracle of our living, breathing life. The world will call Nico Walker many things: drug addict, soldier, bank robber, and inmate. But they’re all fucking lies. After reading this, you’ll say only one thing: Nico Walker is one of the best writers alive.” —Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book and Hill William

“Someone once said there are only two things worth writing about, love and death. Nico Walker may know more about these two subjects than 99.9% of fiction writers working today. Read Cherry instead of the latest piece of fluff—it might be the only time when you truly feel a writer is actually baring their soul to you.” —Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Heavenly Table*

“Harrowing, heartbreaking, and sadly funny. Cherry is a terrific book, a cool book, and Walker’s voice is keen and vigilant and uniquely his own.” —Joe Ide, author of IQ and Righteous