From Mary Karr, author of the bestselling The Liars' Club: the vibrant — often hilarious — story of her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age

Mary Karr told the prizewinning tale of her hardscrabble Texas childhood with enough literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoir. The Liars' Club rode the top of The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, and publications ranging from The New Yorker to People magazine picked it as one of the best books of the year. But it left people wondering: How'd that scrappy kid make it outa there? Cherry dares to tell that story. Karr picks up the trail and dashes off into her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom.

In this long-awaited sequel, we see Karr ultimately trying to run from the thrills and terrors of her sexual awakening by butting up against authority in all its forms. She lands all too often in the principal's office and — in one instance — a jail cell. Looking for a lover or heart's companion who'll make her feel whole, she hooks up with an outrageous band of surfers and heads, wanna-be yogis and bona fide geniuses.

Karr's edgy, brilliant prose careens between hilarity and tragedy, and Cherry takes readers to a place never truly explored — deep inside a girl's stormy, ardent adolescence. Parts will leave you gasping with laughter. But its soaring close proves that from even the smokiest beginnings a solid self can form, one capable of facing down all manner of monsters.

"Readers seduced by Karr's canny memoir of a childhood spent under the spell of a volatile, defiantly loving family in The Liar's Club can look forward to more exquisite writing in this sequel focusing on her adolescence in a dusty Texas town....Moving effortlessly from breathtaking to heart stabbing to laugh out loud raucous, the precision and sheer beauty of Karr's writing remains astounding." Publishers Weekly

"Karr proves herself as fluent in evoking the common ground of adolescence as she did in limning her anomalous girlhood. As she did in Liars' Club, Ms. Karr combines a poet's lyricism and a Texan's down-home vernacular with her natural storytelling gift. Some of her stories are nostalgic for a vanished time and place; some are scathing in their evocation of an insular world; some are just plain funny." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

In the long-awaited sequel to The Liar's Club, Karr picks up the trail of her hardscrabble Texas childhood and dashes off into her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. The book's soaring close proves that from even the smokiest beginnings a solid self can form, one capable of facing down all manners of monsters.

From Mary Karr, author of the bestselling "The Liar's Club", comes the vibrant and often hilarious story of her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age. The audiobook's soaring conclusion proves that from even the smokiest of beginnings, a solid self can form, one capable of facing down all manner of monsters.

From the author of "The Liars' Club" comes this sequel--an often hilarious story of Karr's tumultuous teens and sexual coming of age. Karr dashes down the trail of her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom.

From Mary Karr comes this gorgeously written, often hilarious story of her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age. Picking up where the bestselling The Liars' Club left off, Karr dashes down the trail of her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. Fleeing the thrills and terrors of adolescence, she clashes against authority in all its forms and hooks up with an unforgettable band of heads and bona-fide geniuses. Parts of Cherry will leave you gasping with laughter. Karr assembles a self from the smokiest beginnings, delivering a long- awaited sequel that is both "bawdy and wise" (San Francisco Chronicle).