Sour Cherry
A darkly inventive reimagining of the fairytale Bluebeard, exploring power and toxic masculinity
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 1 Apr 2025
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
'An extraordinary, hallucinatory accomplishment' KAREN JOY FOWLER
'[A] reminder about what it means to be alive . . . with razor-sharp prose and diction so precise' MORGAN TALTY
'Read it and be changed' B. PLADEK
Something terrible has happened.
In a mysterious apartment filled with ghosts, our unnamed narrator attempts to explain this to her child - how do I talk about this? she wonders.
The truth must become something beautiful. We must begin with a fairy tale.
And so she begins to construct a beautiful fairy tale for her child - one that begins with a strange baby boy whose nails grow too fast and whose skin smells of soil. As he grows from a boy into a man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Tragedy strikes in cycles - and wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. These ghosts call out desperately to our narrator as she tries to explain, in the very real world, exactly what has happened to her.
And they 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.
A debut novel as emotionally poignant as it is fiercely smart, Sour Cherry is an arresting debut examining toxic masculinity through its chorus of women - deconstructing the idea of what makes someone a monster.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Theodoridou debuts with a scorching ghost story derived from the French folktale "Bluebeard." The unnamed narrator, a single mother, tries to explain to her young daughter why their apartment is occupied by the bloodied ghosts of women. Attempting a child-friendly version of the truth, she offers a riff on "Bluebeard," telling her daughter about the ghosts' origin stories. Among them are wet nurse Agnes, who ventures to the remote manor of Lord Malcolm and his wife to tend to their unnamed infant son, where she discovers the child has sharp teeth, foreboding eyes, an "earthy smell," and long fingernails. The boy grows up with a cursed and destructive nature; every woman he marries is horrifically abused and murdered before she returns as a vengeful ghost. The women's accounts start to feel repetitive, and the conclusion is a bit rushed, but Theodoridou grimly explores themes of gender oppression and domestic violence as the evil man's wives vanish and are replaced one by one. This dark allegory will linger in readers' minds.
