Sour Cherry
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The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord's baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy--until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay. Natalia Theodoridou's haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.
About this Author
Natalia Theodoridou is a queer and transmasculine writer whose stories have appeared in venues such as Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, and Strange Horizons, and have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Estonian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. He won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and the 2022 Emerging Writer Award by Moniack Mhor & The Bridge Awards, and has been a finalist for the Nebula award multiple times. He holds a PhD in media and cultural studies from SOAS, University of London. Born in Greece, with roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey, he currently lives in the UK.
Reviews
"Haunting and strangely beautiful....Theodoridou's lyrical prose takes otherwise disposable lines and turns them into poetry.... this hallucinatory novel is a sad, violent, horrible delight."
"Masterfully crafted... Like a magic eye picture, Sour Cherry is a horror or thriller when viewed at one angle but, tilted ever so slightly, it's a myth, legend or bedtime storyIt's a tale of buried pain personified as a curse, a beast, a pestilence that follows the family, the bloodline. The fairy tale style only serves to make the truths within it truer. Beautiful and harrowing.... With a writing style that had me mesmerized from the first page, Theodoridou has an amazing talent for storytelling that's so effective that the ending -- while predictable and maybe even unavoidable -- still stunned me and moved me to tears."
"Theodoridou's prose is precise and impressively controlled, often horrific and dark... Bluebeard may seem to be all over the literary landscape these days, but I'm pretty sure you've never seen one quite like this."
"A scorching ghost story. . . . This dark allegory will linger in readers' minds."
"A modern fable masterpiece."
"Haunting. . . . simmers with dark enchantment and Gothic menace. . . The language is atmospheric and surprising. . . . the characters are inventive in chronicling nested fairy tales and unsettling metamorphoses"
"Atmospheric. . . . a Bluebeard's Wife-esque fairy tale horror that questions monstrosity, masculinity, romance, and power.... deeply affecting and unsettling."
"Wholly original and really gorgeous."
"A vicious, beautiful piece of work that will cling to you like a ghost."
"Haunting and unforgettable."
"A folktale, a whisper, and a dream all at once, Theodoridou's debut is beautifully told in rhythmic, singing prose. Sour Cherry is unforgettable?one of my absolute favorites of the year."
"If you love Kelly Link, Angela Carter, and Carmen Maria Machado, then Natalia Theodoridou is your new favorite author. Sour Cherry is a hell of an impressive debut. Subversive, haunting, fantastical but all too real and relevant."
"This gorgeous book will enthrall you like a spell that you cannot nor will you wish to escape. An extraordinary, hallucinatory accomplishment."
"A diamondwork, a treasure chest filled with objects from another world but made familiar to any reader. Only a standout, talented writer can pull this off. Sour Cherry is a remarkable novel, and one I will never forget."
"A Bluebeard retelling of profound beauty and wisdom, Sour Cherry shows us how abuse traps people in stories that help them excuse it?but also survive. Theodoridou is a novelist with a poet's ear and a playwright's nose for irony. His prose is lyric, yet exquisitely controlled: every word feels necessary and inevitable. Like Angela Carter, he uses fairy tale to trace the dark undercurrents of human desire. But Sour Cherry transcends the form of the fairy tale retelling. It moves like a dance, resonates like a chorus; you wake from it as from a dream. Read it and be changed."
"Captivating from the first page to the last, Sour Cherry is a haunting novel that weighs in with Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw and the very best of Angela Carter--but Theodoridou writes with a magnetic strangeness that is all his own. Not many can pull off what he has, bringing new blood to folktale archetypes, blending mystery with a burgeoning, inevitable dread. Heartbreaking and tender, Sour Cherry is a dark delight. It's so damn good I'm already looking forward to reading it again."
"If Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado were trapped in House of Leaves, you'd be holding this book in your hands."
"If Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado were trapped in House of Leaves, you'd be holding this book in your hands."
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