Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou (Paperback) (PREORDER)

Fiction - Literary - Magical Realism - Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

RELEASE DATE: 4/1/2025  (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE AND ARRIVE 1-2 DAYS AFTER THE RELEASE DATE)

A stunning reimagining of Bluebeard―one of the most mythologized serial killers―twisted into a modern tale of toxic masculinity, a feminist sermon, and a folktale for the twenty-first century.

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

AUTHOR BIO: 

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.

“A folktale, a whisper, and a dream all at once.”―Rory Power

“If you love Kelly Link, Angela Carter, and Carmen Maria Machado, then Natalia Theodoridou is your new favorite author.”―Benjamin Percy

These days, there is so much talk about 'making the reader work, ' so much talk about 'challenging readers to think and see things in new ways.' Despite its speculative and transgressive nature, Natalia Theodoridou's novel Sour Cherry is a work that stands in line with such statements, yet delivers its story--the gentle truth or reminder about what it means to be alive, what it means to feel--with razor-sharp prose and diction so precise it is impossible to misunderstand. Reading Sour Cherry did not remind me of great writers. No. It was like I discovered a new one. 'Masterwork' is used so often when discussing a book, and so I'm not going to say it's a masterwork: Sour Cherry is 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.--Morgan Talty, bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit

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.--B. Pladek, author of Dry Land