"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

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.
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. 
Out now from Tin House (North America) or Wildfire (UK, Europe, and Commonwealth). 

Tin House, April 1, 2025.

Wildfire, Headline / Hachette, 1 April 2025

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Praise for Sour Cherry

"Wholly original and really gorgeous."
— Polygon

“A modern fable masterpiece, twisting the folktale of Bluebeard to tell the story of the lingering traumas of toxic masculinity and violence have on the world around us. I think this is a book best experienced with little explanation, but I will say this: Natalia Theodoridou perfectly captures the darkness of his topic while also breaking apart and rebuilding the very idea of storytelling in the most fascinating ways.” 
— Chicago Review of Books

"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

“Sour Cherry is 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. . . . stunned me and moved me to tears."
​— Associated Press Book Review

“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, Red Moon, and Thrill Me

"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

"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

“Sour Cherry is a song you think you’ve heard before, but never in this voice. This voice may be a stream of birds flying from the mouth of a ghost. Everything is vivid, as if you’re seeing the world for the first time, so clear as to be painful, so sharp and smoky on the tongue, so gravid with sensation in the mouth. This story knows how dreadful longing is, and how cruel hope, how loving and being loved makes monsters. With bitter irony and utter, intoxicating sincerity in every sentence, Theodoridou opens the body of an old story with a knife and takes out all the bones and the organs too, all that pulsating ropy labyrinth still rushing with hot fluids, too much of it all to be accounted for by any single corpus, and makes of it a house for you to be haunted in. A magnificent novel and, unbelievably, a debut—you must read this as soon as you can.”
— Vajra Chandrasekera, author of The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall

“Sour Cherry is perfect for anyone who loves a dark fairy tale (but aren't they all dark?), a suspenseful ghost story, a story about the power and tragedy of stories, past and present. Its villain brings to mind serial abusers both classic and contemporaneous, fictional and real: Bluebeard, Shahryar, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby. Its heroine is every woman who tells herself, and us, stories about this terrible, beautiful world we live in. In his thrilling debut, Natalia Theodoridou asks: Why and how do bad men wield power over their victims, over bystanders, over the stories we tell ourselves? How is violence justified? I didn't want to put this book down, and now that I've turned the last page, I'll be haunted by it forever." 
— Eman Quotah, author of Bride of the Sea and The Night Is Not for You

“A harrowing indictment of poisonous masculinity and its far-reaching, wide-ranging consequences, its nurturers, gatekeepers and victims." 
— Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ, author of Dazzling