Natalia Theodoridou is joining us today to talk about his novel, Sour Cherry. Here’s the publisher’s description:
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.
What’s Natalia’s favorite bit?
Sour Cherry, my debut novel that came out on April 1st (a detail that will forever tickle me), is a Bluebeard retelling about toxic masculinity, domestic violence, and cycles of abuse. In it, a mother is telling her young son the story of a boy whose skin smelled of soil, whose nails grew too fast, and who seemed to cause the land and the people around him to erupt with strange plagues. The boy in her story grew up to be a man whom destruction followed wherever he went. Wife after wife, the women he married perished, disappeared, turned into ghosts. The narrator’s time is running out, and she must finish telling her story before it does. But there are just so many, many wives.
A little after the middle of the book, the chapters become shorter and shorter, each following the story of one of this man’s unfortunate wives. The narrator is running out of time, but, like a reverse Scheherazade, she will not be released until she tells the story of every single one of these women. The more she tells, the more there are. She loses count, or maybe the man does, or maybe we do. The wives proliferate. They repeat, they rhyme, they become increasingly fantastical, metaphorical, symbolic, their stories muddled and impossible. These chapters are my favorite bit of this book. I could have written ten more of these wives, a hundred more. Because there are so many of them, stories like these. You know? They are all similar in some ways; if you squint, you might think it’s the same exact story told over and over again: She loved him. He was kind to her, until he wasn’t. He apologized. She thought he would change. But there’s always something different, too, the crucial detail that makes each one of these stories unique, each wife uniquely vulnerable, trapped in some new way. People often ask of survivors, “why didn’t they just leave?” There are so many answers. And they’re all the same answer, distinctive and complex in a thousand ways.
It’s a bit brutal, my favorite bit. I know that. But I love the wife who liked to think of herself as a doll. I love the one obsessed with the miniature house she commissioned, who one day found herself trapped within it, her life diminished. I love, even, the one who gave birth to a white stone. For me, these chapters are the focal point of the entire novel. Without what came before—the wet nurse’s story, the man’s boyhood, the first wife and her son— this bit would have been impossible to narrate. And without this bit, the narrator’s own story wouldn’t have made any sense at all. She has to recount them all, bead by bead, wife after wife on a long string. Without the recounting, the ending would never come. Perhaps that’s why, if my editors had let me, I would still be there, with my unfinished novel, writing the story of the thousandth wife.
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BIO:
Natalia Theodoridou is a transmasculine writer whose stories have appeared in venues such as Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Uncanny Magazine, and Strange Horizons, and have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Estonian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. Natalia 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, and is a Clarion West graduate. Born in Greece, with roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey, he currently lives in the UK. His debut novel, Sour Cherry, came out in April 2025 from Tin House (US) and Wildfire (UK).
