Cheri: 'Too good to miss' Anne Enright, Guardian

An Irish Times Book of the Year 2023 'An extraordinary achievement' Mary Gaitskill 'In the hands of a maestro, less can be so much more' Independent Cheri has been living with cancer for many years. Now, she is dying. As she navigates the final weeks of her life, and takes charge of the manner of her death, she is flooded with childhood memories, and returns to the present with a renewed appreciation for the brilliance of life around her: the autumn has never been so beautiful, her daughters never as radiant. Brave, incredibly strong and deeply loved, Cheri makes one last nerve-wracking journey across the country with her girls and her friends, knowing relief waits welcoming as a frozen lake on the other side. A masterpiece of fiction and memory, Cheri is a heart-breaking but glorious celebration of all the moments of beauty and pain that make an individual life, right up until its very last moments.

About the Author :
Jo Ann Beard is the author the collections Festival Days and The Boys of My Youth, and the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and others, and has received a Whiting Foundation Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature and in 2024 was announced as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Review :
Cheri is richly packed. The details are laid before the reader with a simplicity that feels like grace. Beard's vocabulary is luminous ... Beard combines the lapidary chill of Joan Didion with the sense of a proper, lived humanity that you get from a writer like Grace Paley or Sigrid Nunez. She is good company. She connects. You should read her and not look away Beard's writing is majestic and ultimately offers some hope, because the book is essentially less about death and more about what it is to be alive ... In the hands of a maestro, less can be so much more Beard's wry voice and her clear-eyed compassion make her the best sort of company Cheri is a masterpiece As controlled and convincing as art Profoundly sad, poignant, and filled with the flabbergasting abundance of life ... an extraordinary achievement Extraordinary and powerful A gem of a book ... Beard communicates, quietly and almost plainly, a breathless desperation for life and all its terrible beauty I was shocked by my emotional response to it. It's beautiful & sad & dignified Beard honours the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life, and for life's inescapable cruelites and woes she offers the wisdom of a sage Jo Ann Beard is a formidable talent. Her writing is darkly moving, full of audacious narrative surprises, and, at times, unexpectedly - almost unbearably - suspenseful A rare talent, and a magnificent writer ... She is extraordinary Taut and troubling ... rendered with exquisite restraint and precision ... as powerful as the close of The Death of Ivan Ilyich A tour de force ... feels like a bravura attempt to rescue Cheri from the loneliness of her death