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The Cherry Robbers

by Sarai Walker

Narrator January LaVoy

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Length 15 hours 31 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“The Cherry Robbers is both beautiful and horrifying with a decidedly gothic feel to it. The prose is incredibly beautiful to be telling such a sad and tragic tale. It has themes of insanity, ghosts and a powerful sense of feminism all set in the 1950s of New England. While this was far from my usual read, I was drawn to Iris’s story and could not stop listening.”
— Nancy • Fiction Addiction

Bookseller recommendation

“The Bellflower Village is convinced that the Chapel family is cursed, with their wedding cake shaped house and crazy (or clairvoyant depending who you ask) mother, and a fortune made from death. And then the six daughters start dying off, one by one, buried in their barely-cool wedding dresses. To survive, the remaining daughter has to become someone else entirely and run as far away as she can. But how long can she keep it up? A gorgeous 1950s gothic tale with phenomenal storytelling and spooky atmosphere.”
— Emma • Quail Ridge Books

Summary
About the author

""Sarai Walker has done it again. With The Cherry Robbers she upends the Gothic ghost story with a fiery feminist zeal."" —Maria Semple

The highly anticipated second novel from Sarai Walker, following her “slyly subversive” (EW) cult-hit Dietland—a feminist gothic about the lone survivor of a cursed family of sisters, whose time may finally be up.

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.

INSTEAD IT WAS THE LAST.

Iris Chapel and her five elegant sisters, all of them heiresses to the Chapel firearms fortune, live cloistered in a lavish Victorian mansion. Neglected by both a distant, workaholic father and a mentally troubled mother—who believes their home is haunted by the victims of Chapel weapons—the sisters have grown up with only each other for company. They long to escape the eerie fairy tale of their childhood and move forward into the modern world, but for young women in 1950s Connecticut, the only way out is through marriage.

Yet it soon becomes clear that for the Chapel sisters, marriage equals death.

When the eldest sister walks down the aisle, tragedy strikes. The bride dies mysteriously the very next day, leaving her family and the town in shock. But this is just the beginning of a chain of disasters that will make each woman wonder whether true love will kill her, too. Only Iris, the second-youngest, finds a way to escape—but can she outrun the family curse forever?

Sarai Walker, the acclaimed author of the cult-hit novel Dietland, building off the Gothic tradition of Shirley Jackson, brings to life this riveting, deliciously twisted feminist tale, a gorgeous and provocative page-turner about the legacy of male power and the cost of female freedom.

Fiction Mystery & Thriller Fiction - Literary

Sarai Walker is the author of the novel Dietland, which has been published in more than a dozen countries and adapted as a television series for AMC. She has lectured on feminism and body image internationally, and has spoken about these topics widely in the media. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and elsewhere, and she worked as a writer and editor on an updated version of Our Bodies, Ourselves. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College and a PhD in English from the University of London. She lives in Philadelphia.