‘The Sirens’ by Emilia Hart is our ‘GMA’ Book Club selection for April

“The Sirens” of the bestselling author Emilia Hart of the New York Times is our “GMA” book club election for April.

Like her debut novel “Weyward”, this story researches the strength of women – this time through the secrets of the sea.

Three timelines that extend the sirens follow:

• 2019: Lucy, who flees after a violent nightmare, arrives in her sister’s coastal house – just missing her and rumors that are lost at sea.
• 1999: Tenager Jess, isolated from a rare allergy to water, forms a dangerous connection to her art teacher.
• 1800: The twin sisters Mary and Eliza, which are torn from their house in Ireland and directed to Australia, begin to hear the ocean’s reputation – just as their bodies begin to change.

“A breathtaking story of female resilience and the ties of sisterhood over time and space, ‘the sirens’ captures the power of dreams and the secret and the magic of the sea,” says the synopse of the book.

Read an extract below and get a copy of the book here.

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The sirens of Emilia Hart

This month we also collect with Little Free Library to output free copies on Times Square and at 150 locations in the USA and Canada. Since 2009, more than 300 million books in Little Free Libraries have been shared in Little Free Libraries. Click here to find a copy of “The Sirens” on a small free library location near you.

Read us with us and include all the month in our Instagram account, @gmabook club and with #gmabook club.

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Chapter 4: Lucy

The journey to Comber Bay is tinted green by rubber trees, which close low and across the street. It winds the window down and breathes in in the rich air: the eucalypta, the intoxicating sweetness of Wattle.

Zikada’s humks and she catches the throat music of the call of a magpies, the familiar sounds soothing.

She almost forgot that she is near the coast until the bush falls on one side and the bay comes into view and Lucy’s heart stops in her chest.

She checks her rearview mirror before slowing down to get a better look. It is breathtaking: a green tangle made of scrubbing, cheating of red flashing of banks deviates the cliff.

And then the sea, bright and unreal like a painting. She has never seen so many shades of blue: shine near the Breaker turquoise; Further outside is a blue that is so dark that it is almost black.

Lucy shakes and thinks of the world under the waves from the Spangd. The coast curves around so that it can see the cliffs on the other side of the bay as it corresponds to caves.

Viewpoint of the devil. It is the same view that she has already seen on Jess’ postcard, but the photographer had not completely captured the uncanny of the cliff face.

Personally, the caves look deeper and darker; One in particular one that is closest to the waterline is big enough that it can almost imagine that a demon lurks there and interviews the sea underneath.

A sting begins at the base of Lucy’s spine. Maybe it is the knowledge of what the water would do to your skin.

It imagines that the waves rings like tongues to them and roam them out of meat until it is nothing but bones and white is glading.

Chapter 9: Mary

The voices of the other women seemed to be a terrible, endless sound as if a creature had stowed away with them.

The moaning and screaming and eyelashes melt together and pulsed with the waves.

Everything was louder in the dark.

How she hated it, this blackness.

When the night was deep – when no light shone through the cracks between the planks over it – she no longer knew where her body ended and the darkness began.

Sometimes she was grateful for the cramping hunger in her stomach, the rawness of her skin. It assured her that she still existed.

It was Eliza that taught her how to tell the women apart how to navigate this world of thanks to Wood against her body, creaking ropes and slippery bilges.

“You have to learn your voices,” she whispered and laced her cold fingers through Mary’s. “Everyone has a difference, a narrative. Start with those in the berth over us.”

Mary listened and realized that Eliza was right. Slowly different voices appeared, like a river that divided into smaller streams.

“This is Bridie,” whispered Eliza when a woman laughed when the ship set up and the slop bucket opened. “I think it has to be very nice. This laugh – rich like watering beer in a glass.”

Mary recognized the laugh and realized that she had already noticed his owner: The fingers of light had chosen the fire of her hair, the milky curve of a cheek.

“Yes,” she said to Eliza, pressing her hand. “She has red hair; I saw it.”

Together, the sisters listened and learned the rhythm of the voice of every woman. For the first time, Mary noticed what Eliza always knew that a voice had valleys and rocks who told them about forms of sadness.

They could almost feel it under their fingers as if it were land.

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From “The Sirens” by Emilia Hart. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted with the approval of the St. Martin publishing group.