Cheri by Jo Ann Beard

A heart-breaking but glorious celebration of all the moments of beauty and pain that make an individual life, right up until it's very last moments.

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 memories, vivid fragments from childhood, adolescence, marriage and motherhood. These bring her back 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, this slim novella 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. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Hardback with dust jacket
96 pages
120 x 18 x 184 mm