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.