Here’s the sixth in a series of posts reviewing the 2026 Nebula Awards short-listed works in the Best Novel category. To see the complete list, go HERE. I’m on a mission to read and review all seven of these novels before the Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announces the winner at the Nebula awards ceremony on June 6, 2026. It will take place at the SFWA 61st annual conference, held this year in Chicago. I’m reading the novels alphabetically by author. If I have time, I’ll read a few others nominated in other categories.
The short-listed novels for the 2026 Nebula Awards:
When We Were Real, by Daryl Gregory (Saga)–see my review HERE
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga; Titan UK)—see my review HERE
Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)–see my review HERE
Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow; Gollancz)–see my review HERE
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh (Tor; Orbit UK)–see my review HERE
Sour Cherry, by Natalia Theodoridou (Tin House; Wildfire)–reviewed in this post
Wearing the Lion, by John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia)
Sour Cherry, by Natalia Theodoridou (Tin House; Wildfire)
As a re-imagining of the Bluebeard fairy tale, Theodoridou’s novel sounds a lot like a re-re-imagining of the Angela Carter 1979 Bluebeard story, “The Bloody Chamber.” Sour Cherry shares a similar Gothic vibe with Carter’s magnificent tale and similar deep-psychological underpinnings.
In Theodoridou’s version, a storyteller is spinning a tale for a young boy, presumably her son. The entire first half of the novel doesn’t mirror the Bluebeard fairy tale very literally, although its sinister lord of the manor shares a lot of the same terrifying characteristics: blue-black beard, domineering presence, aura of barely-suppressed violence, abuse of women in general, his many wives in particular. But in Sour Cherry, a mixture of the realistic and the mythic reveals his origin story and the devastating effect he has on the very land he inhabits. Its crops wither; its people die.
Theodoridou organizes this tale by the succession of women the unnamed lord destroys, starting with his wan, almost ghostly mother and his wet nurse, who adores him even as she comes to realize what he is. With each iteration, the lord becomes more and more like Bluebeard.
At one point, the storyteller describes her role as a reverse Scheherazade. The reader’s dread increases as each successive horrifying act draws the Bluebeard narrative closer and closer to the storyteller and her son, and as the overall tale moves from some mythic past and landscape into the contemporary present.
Theodoridou’s novel uncovers the oppressive destruction wrought by the most extreme stereotype of maleness on any female crossing his path–and ultimately, upon himself as well. “Will I grow up to be like him?” the boy in the story worries. Is toxic masculinity inevitable? How much complicity does the extreme stereotype of the female shoulder in this destructive dynamic–or any woman trapped in its toils? The novel uses the underlying Bluebeard story to raise these important questions and pose some answers.
Of her own work, Carter comments (as Helen Simpson reports in “Femme fatale: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber,” The Guardian, June 24, 2006): “my intention was not to do ‘versions’ or. . .’adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.” In Theodoridou’s novel I see a worthy descendant. In addition, her novel offers a desperately needed critique of toxic masculinity, a desperate revelation of the mechanisms behind domestic abuse, that are all the author’s own.
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