Nico Walker is originally from Cleveland. Cherry is his debut novel.
“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 singular portrait of the opioid epidemic. . . . [Walker] writes
dialogue so musical and realistic you’ll hear it in the air around
you.” —The New York Times Book Review
“[An] unforgettable mix of doomed and dazzling. . . . There’s a
vivid, repulsive truth in the way Walker renders his subjects—a
sort of social truth, stripped of morality, which is rare and
riveting when it comes to the subjects of opioid addiction,
intimate everyday cruelty, and endless, meaningless war.” —The New
Yorker
“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
“A raw coming-of-age story in reverse. . .
. Cherry touches on some of the darkest chapters of
recent American history.” —The New York Times
“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
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