Sirens

In 2019, Lucy wakes with her hands around the throat of her sleeping ex-lover, with no memory of how she got there and a head full of strange, salt-soaked dreams. Terrified of herself, she flees to the coast of New South Wales to find her older sister Jess, only to discover that Jess has vanished from her clifftop home.

Waiting for her sister, Lucy pieces together unsettling local lore: men who have disappeared off the same stretch of coast for generations, a baby found in a sea cave, voices carried on the waves. In Jess's hidden diary she uncovers a painful past of her own. Their story is threaded through with that of Mary and Eliza, Irish twin sisters transported to Australia as convicts in 1800, who begin to feel their bodies changing on the long voyage across the sea.

Emilia Hart's second novel weaves myth, history, and sisterhood into an atmospheric mystery about the pull of the ocean and the women it claims and protects.