Emilia Hart dazzled readers in 2023 with her debut, WEYWARD, a hauntingly beautiful tale of witches and women accused. Now, two years later, Hart proves that her spellbinding works of historical fiction are here to stay with THE SIRENS, a mythical, deeply transformative novel set on the coast of Australia, where women have been drowning and disappearing for centuries. Or have they?

The first thing that awakens Lucy Martin are the screams. When she opens her eyes, her hands are firmly around the throat of her classmate and one-time lover, Ben. His neck is bruised, his eyes are bulging, and already she can hear the cries of “She’s crazy!” coming from Ben’s neighbors. Lucy swears that she was sleepwalking, but there was an incident recently --- an ill-advised nude photo sent to entice Ben that later made its way onto TikTok --- and then there’s the dream. As Lucy wrapped her hands around Ben’s throat, she dreamed not of revenge or vengeance, but of cold water licking her skin and the scrape of rock against her skull.

As a journalism major, Lucy is all too aware that the media is always so quick to blame, shame and villainize women. After a disastrous meeting with her college counselor, she knows that Ben will never see any consequences for distributing that picture. Now that she has attacked him --- in her sleep, no less (and she has never been a sleepwalker) --- Lucy isn’t sure there’s any way for her to return to college.

"Haunting, immersive and deeply alive, THE SIRENS feels as storied and ancient as the myths it explores, a true classic-in-the-making work of feminist fire and fury.... Emilia Hart is a truly gifted, spellbinding author, and I cannot wait to see where she turns her prowess next."

There’s only one place she can go: Comber Bay, the home of her older sister, Jess…and the site of many of Australia’s most horrifying crimes, disappearances and deaths. So deadly, in fact, is Comber Bay that it has been given the nickname “Australia’s Bermuda Triangle.” It’s not exactly a tourist destination --- unless you’re a true-crime voyeur --- but Comber Bay makes sense for Jess, an artist, who has always kept Lucy and her parents at arm’s length. And right now, it seems like a haven. However, when Lucy arrives at her sister’s address, a dilapidated old house practically falling off the coast’s cliffs, there’s no Jess. All she sees are massive, horrifying paintings of scaly, otherworldly sisters, their greenish-blue skin glimmering amid deadly waves, her sister’s brushstrokes violent and kinetic.

Two hundred years ago, two sisters set off for Comber Bay, but their story is, somehow, much darker. Twins Mary and Eliza Kissane were raised in Cork, Ireland, by their father after their mother drowned at sea. For years, Mary has described the world, bringing it to life for her sightless sister, a girl who can sing but not see. Poor, motherless and Catholic in a world of Protestant English rule, they are targeted by a lecherous landlord and unjustly sentenced to exile.

This punishment lands them below the deck of the Naiad, a convict ship bound for New South Wales, or Australia as it is known today. Together with 80 other women, the sisters endure the cramped, unsanitary conditions of their journey, all the while reckoning with the fact that their own mother drowned in the sea in which they now float, as well as their father’s warning that they must never touch its waters. As they toss and turn in the choppy ocean, they learn the stories of their fellow women, most of whom are sentenced to death for similar, misogynistic reasons: fighting off a rapist, stealing a bit of cloth for a baby’s diaper. The girls do not know what awaits them in New South Wales. But as they struggle to maintain their sanity, witchy, weird Eliza keeps reciting one of their mother’s tales --- the story of a merrow who fell in love with a fisherman and the twin daughters they made.

Alternating between Lucy’s search for Jess, and Mary’s desperate fight to keep herself and her sister alive, Emilia Hart spins a centuries-in-the-making tale of oppression, abuse and reckoning. Lucy’s search for answers leads her deep into Australia’s past as she learns of convict ships like the Naiad, but also of the mysterious Eight --- eight random, completely unconnected men who have all vanished from Comber Bay --- and Baby Hope, a newborn found miraculously unharmed deep in one of the bay’s caves. The discovery of Jess’ teenage diary raises more questions than it answers.

But even as she dedicates herself to her investigation, Jess can feel her hold on reality slipping. Her flaking skin, the result of a water-reactive disorder known as aquagenic urticaria, worsens, peeling off in sheets that reveal a glimmery blue sheen to her flesh; her nightmares and sleepwalking continue, bolstered by dreams of drowning sisters; and, perhaps worst of all, she remains no closer to finding Jess, or even understanding her mindset at the time of her disappearance.

Meanwhile, in the 1800s, Mary and Eliza learn that the water is not the most dangerous thing they face at sea. It’s the men.

THE SIRENS is based loosely on England’s convict ships of the late 1700s. In addition to exiling citizens from their homes, this practice also decimated Australia’s Aboriginal and islander populations, as countless lives were lost to colonial violence and imported disease. Hart doesn’t pretend to be an expert on British carceral practices, but what she absolutely is an expert on is women. She knows the ways in which they have been subjugated, oppressed and marginalized throughout history, but also how generations of women have developed and passed down mythologies to help explain the violence and bolster themselves against it.

Just as she did in WEYWARD, Hart once again turns her discerning, unflinching eye on a mythological creature that has long been used to vilify women: the siren, known for her fatal combination of death and desire. But as she demonstrates, the question is not if sirens are real (though after reading her spectacular novel, I truly hope they are!), but what their stories mean to women, and how their lore proves that women have long protected and supported one another.

Haunting, immersive and deeply alive, THE SIRENS feels as storied and ancient as the myths it explores, a true classic-in-the-making work of feminist fire and fury. I can’t say for sure if you’ll want to race to the nearest coast or avoid it at all costs after finishing this bewitching novel, but you certainly will never look at a stormy sea the same way again. Emilia Hart is a truly gifted, spellbinding author, and I cannot wait to see where she turns her prowess next.