Sour Cherry

'An extraordinary, hallucinatory accomplishment' KAREN JOY FOWLER'[A] reminder about what it means to be alive . . . with razor-sharp prose and diction so precise' MORGAN TALTY'Read it and be changed' B.PLADEKSomething terrible has happened. 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. The truth must become something beautiful. We must begin with a fairy tale. 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. And they all agree on one thing, a