Synopses & Reviews
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 to
desperation. 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.
Review
"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
About the 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.