Sour Cherry

<p><b>'An extraordinary, hallucinatory accomplishment' KAREN JOY FOWLER</b><br><b>'[A] reminder about what it means to be alive . . . with razor-sharp prose and diction so precise' MORGAN TALTY</b><br><b>'Read it and be changed' B. PLADEK</b><br><br><br><b>Something terrible has happened. <br></b><br>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.<br><br>The truth must become something beautiful. We must begin with a fairy tale.<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, Sour Cherry is an arresting debut examining toxic masculinity through its chorus of women - deconstructing the idea of what makes someone a monster.</b></p>