Sour Cherry

by Natalia Theodoridou Narrated by Erifyli Gigante

Overview

“A folktale, a whisper, and a dream all at once.”-Rory Power, author of Wilder Girls

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

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"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."— New York Times Book Review

"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."— Associated Press

"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."— Locus

"A scorching ghost story. . . . This dark allegory will linger in readers’ minds."— Publishers Weekly

"A modern fable masterpiece."— Chicago Review of Books, A Most Anticipated Book of 2025

"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"— Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

"Atmospheric. . . . a Bluebeard’s Wife-esque fairy tale horror that questions monstrosity, masculinity, romance, and power…. deeply affecting and unsettling."— Reactor, A Most Anticipated SFF Book of 2025

"Wholly original and really gorgeous."— Polygon

"A vicious, beautiful piece of work that will cling to you like a ghost."— Den of Geeks

"Haunting and unforgettable."— READJUMPSCARES

"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."— Rory Power, New York Times bestselling author of Wilder Girls

"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."— Benjamin Percy, author of The Ninth Metal

"This gorgeous book will enthrall you like a spell that you cannot nor will you wish to escape. An extraordinary, hallucinatory accomplishment."— Karen Joy Fowler, author of Booth

"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."— Morgan Talty, bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire ExitMorgan 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

"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."— Natasha Calder, author of Whether Violent or Natural

"If Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado were trapped in House of Leaves, you’d be holding this book in your hands."— Southern Bookseller Review

"If Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado were trapped in House of Leaves, you’d be holding this book in your hands."— Southern Bookseller Review

"Theodoridou’s prose is beautiful… past and present, fairytale and reality, are woven together so tightly that the weave is impossible to pick apart."— PSYCHOPOP

"Sour Cherry is an ambitious gothic story that doesn’t rely on the novelty of being a Bluebeard retelling to remain interesting. Between lush prose and textured characters, it kept my attention."— Las Vegas Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

2025-03-22
Theodoridou’s “Bluebeard” retelling asks if monsters are born or made.

An unnamed stage actress sits in her apartment, telling her young son a fairy story. Urged on by the ghosts of blood-drenched women that only she can see, she speaks of a boy born in a stately home. A curious, perpetually hungry child with sharp nails and pointed teeth, the boy is abandoned by his spectral mother and soon-dead father, and doted on by his wet nurse, Agnes. He seems to bring a curse upon the village—the crops suffer blight year upon year, walls crumble, a young girl’s skin peels from her bones. When Eunice, a villager who played with the boy as a child, moves into the manor as his lover, the furious townspeople storm the gates with pitchforks, and the young couple flees. A shotgun wedding in a roadside chapel makes Eunice the first of his many abused and blighted wives, and the only one to bear him a son of his own. Young Tristan grows up determined to take revenge on his father—and the narrator’s son listens with bated breath. Theodoridou interweaves teller and tale to dizzying effect, leaving the reader to relish in some satisfying uncertainties. The narrator’s own career staging shows about violent men adds a delicious metatextual twist. “Easier to tell you of a man who was a myth, a natural disaster, a fairy-tale thing,” the narrator concedes to her son, “than to say your father is a wife-beater, a rapist, a murderer.” Unfortunately, the book’s length outstrips its conceit—a dense, dark gem of a story becomes frustratingly repetitive. The carousel of murdered wives, rotting fruit, and blood-soaked gowns evokes the cyclical horrors of abuse, but the eventual predictability soon dulls the narrative’s edge.

A rich, relentless—if overlong—tale of violence and the men who wield it.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193424901
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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