Introduction

Jesus' Son meets Reservoir Dogs in a breakneck-paced debut novel about love, war, bank robberies, and heroin.
 
“Nico Walker’s Cherry might be the first great novel of the opioid epidemic.” —Vulture
 
“A miracle of literary serendipity. . . . [Walker’s] language, relentlessly profane but never angry, simmers at the level of morose disappointment, something like Holden Caulfield Goes to War.” —The Washington Post
 
It's 2003, and as a college freshman in Cleveland, our narrator is adrift until he meets Emily. The two of them experience an instant, life-changing connection. But when he almost loses her, he chooses to make an indelible statement: he joins the Army.

The outcome will not be good for either of them.

As a medic in Iraq, he is unprepared for the realties that await him. He and his fellow soldiers huff computer duster, abuse painkillers, and watch porn. Many of them die. When he comes home, his PTSD is profound. As the opioid crisis sweeps through the Midwest, it drags both him and Emily along with it. As their addictions worsen, and with their money drying up, he stumbles onto what seems like the only possible 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.

Editorial 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

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