Tomi Adeyemi built a world in Orïsha and sold more than three million copies of it. Her Legacy of Orïsha trilogy, which began with Children of Blood and Bone in 2018 and closed with Children of Anguish and Anarchy in 2024, spent more than 120 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and is on its way to the screen in a Paramount Pictures adaptation. On September 29, Adeyemi left the fantasy map behind for somewhere more dangerous: an Ivy League campus. The Siren, her standalone new novel, was published by Henry Holt and Company, an imprint of Macmillan, simultaneously with Macmillan UK.

Emery arrives at Dartmouth determined to keep her scholarship, take her meds and make sure nobody ever learns about the past she left behind. Then she meets Roux — intoxicating, magnetic — and the beautiful circle of girls Roux calls the Sirens. The Sirens were once outcasts at the bottom of the school’s social order; under Roux, their wildest dreams came true, and their lives are now wrapped in extravagance and secret parties. When Roux offers Emery a place among them, Emery will do whatever it takes to get in — even if the price of entry is her life. Adeyemi narrates the audiobook edition herself.

It is a sharp turn from epic fantasy into contemporary dark academia with a sinister, speculative edge — a story about rage, longing, power and the cost of belonging. Adeyemi has not been shy about what the book means to her. In a statement shared by Publishers Weekly, she called The Siren “the book of my soul. It is the rawest, most heartbreaking, and most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced writing.”

Pictured here on stage at Barnes & Noble in conversation with Imani Ellis, Adeyemi is meeting readers where this new chapter begins. The girl who wrote her way into publishing history as a teenager is now writing about young women who would trade anything for power — and asking what that trade really costs.

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