Sour Cherry

<p><b>''An extraordinary, hallucinatory accomplishment'' KAREN JOY FOWLER</b><br><b>''[A] </b><b>reminder about what it means to be alive . . . </b><b>with razor-sharp prose and diction so precise'' MORGAN TALTY</b><br><b>''Read it and be changed'' B. PLADEK</b><br><b><br><br>Something terrible has happened. </b><br><br>In a mysterious apartment filled with ghosts, our unnamed narrator attempts to explain this to her child - <i>how do I talk about this? </i>she wonders. <br><br>The truth must become something beautiful. <i>We must begin with a fairy tale. </i><br><br>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. <br><br>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: <br><br><b>If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.</b><br><br><b>A debut novel as emotionally poignant as it is fiercely smart, <i>Sour Cherry </i>is an arresting debut examining toxic masculinity through its chorus of women </b><b>-</b><b> deconstructing the idea of what makes someone a monster.</b></p>