Wildfire bags reimagining of Bluebeard from Natalia Theodoridou

Wildfire has bagged Sour Cherry, a "stirring" reimagining of the French folktale "Bluebeard", from debut novelist Natalia Theodoridou. 

Areen Ali, assistant editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Susan Armstrong at C&W, on behalf of Danya Kukafka at Trellis Literary Management. North American rights went to Tin House. Sour Cherry will be published on 1st Aprl 2025. 

The story is described as a "polyphonic interrogation of gender and power" following an unnamed narrator, who is trying to come to terms with something terrible. Set in a flat filled with ghosts, the woman tells her child a fairy tale that begins with a strange baby boy. 

The publisher continued: "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." 

"I see novels as very long answers to complicated questions I couldn’t possibly answer otherwise", said Theodoridou. "This one tells a story of masculinity and, through its chorus of women, asks what makes someone a monster: is it nature or nurture? Is it class, or power, or the complicity of others? It is also a story about domestic violence and cycles of abuse – for all of us who got out, and for all of us who didn’t."

Ali added: "This is a novel that will stay with you long after you’ve read the last word. Natalia is a hugely imaginative writer. The way he homes in on how a toxic relationship decays, slowly at first and then with a furious destructiveness, is captivating. This novel serves as both a feminist cautionary tale and a queer-inclusive fable for the modern age, which will appeal to fans of Angela Carter, Julia Armfield and Carmen Maria Machado." 

Natalia Theodoridou’s stories have appeared in venues such as Kenyon Review, the Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter and Strange Horizons, and have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Estonian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. He has won a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, a Word Factory Apprentice Award, the 2022 Emerging Writer Award by Moniack Mhor, and has been a finalist for the Nebula award multiple times. He holds a PhD in Media from SOAS, University of London. Born in Greece, with roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey, he currently lives in the UK.