Sirens Sing

A beautiful novel from multi-award-winning writer Kristel Thornell, The Sirens Sing is about the haunting force of love and desire that ricochets between lives, across generations and through time. It is a portrait of Australian longing.

The Blue Mountains, mid-1990s. Heather and David are two young people on the brink of adulthood, drawn together by their study of Italian. David is smitten with Heather, but has no idea how she feels about him. Besides Italian in common, they are both children of struggling single mothers, who raised them in the grungy Inner West of Sydney - share houses, a squat, a Housing Commission flat - before moving to Blackheath. At a festive evening to celebrate Heather's final high-school exam, events take a course that will profoundly change the lives of everyone present.

Sydney, mid-1970s. Jan, the unconfident daughter of working-class parents and the first in her family to go to university, strikes up a friendship with bohemian, assured Alicia. They quickly become close. But one night down by Blackwattle Bay - the night of Gough Whitlam's dismissal - things go awry.

A tender and poignant novel from award-winning writer Kristel Thornell, The Sirens Sing is a portrait of Australian longing. It explores desire, how it haunts and shapes us, and how, from generation to generation, there are echoes, overlaps and intersections in how we love, who we love, and why we love, as we are compelled to repeat the same patterns over and over again, like moths to a flame.

Auteur

Kristel Thornell was born in Sydney and has lived in Italy, Mexico, Canada, Finland, the United States and France, where she is now based. She has degrees in Italian Studies and English, and a PhD from the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. She has published short fiction, poetry, reviews, essays and the novel Night Street (2010), for which she co-won the Australian/Vogel's Literary Award and won the Dobbie Literary Award and the Barbara Ramsden Award. She was shortlisted for the Glenda Adams Award and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the NSW Premier's Awards and was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists in 2011. Her second novel, On the Blue Train, was published in 2016.