Vonnegut's chilling early masterpiece

Mother Night is not one of his most famous books, but it's one of the best

A brilliant wacky ideas-monger

Everyone should read Vonnegut

A cool writer, at once throwaway and passionate and very funny

One of the master alchemists of modern American fiction

A laughing prophet of doom

Vonnegut saw the worst excesses of humanity during the bombing of Dresden, but then spent the rest of his life writing with a mixture of exasperation and hope about the foibles of humanity.

One of the best living American writers

[Cherry] presents a searing indictment of both war and the indifference of the society in whose name war is fought… In this troubling and powerful book, Walker has surely created one of the most distinctive and memorable novels of the year.

A buzzsaw of a novel... Bracingly original.

The narrator [of Cherry is] one of the most fascinating characters in recent fiction.

Really compelling... [Cherry] just shoots forwards in the most extraordinary way... [Walker] is incredibly good on the absolute corporeality of the [Iraq War]. That was brilliantly done.

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.

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.

A raw coming-of-age story in reverse... Cherry touches on some of the darkest chapters of recent American history.

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.

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... Nico Walker is one of the best writers alive.

A compelling new work of fiction.

Walker’s raw confessional novel, aptly compared to Jesus’ Son and Reservoir Dogs, is a devastating example of art imitating life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cherry, Nico Walker’s outstanding debut, is a hard-hitting, ghoulishly funny novel about drug addiction, war and bank robbery.

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.

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.

One of the most exciting new American novelists.

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.

A bruising dispatch from the frontline of the American opioid crisis… the final quarter [of Cherry] rushes by in a cold sweat.

[An] incendiary debut… Nico Walker writes with real rhythm, exhibiting a poet’s discrimination about adjectival choice and the relative length of clauses. It is a rare and remarkable achievement to turn such suffering into a novel of such finely calibrated beauty.

A gritty, addictive read.

I think everyone should read it – it is so horrific.

A well-received return to form

Astonishingly bold novel… [It] is Amis’s best work in years

Amis’s best work since Money