In 2016, Sirens examined lovers and the idea that whom you choose to love—or not love—changes you and helps you change the world, with Guests of Honor Renée Ahdieh, Laurie J. Marks, and Kiini Ibura Salaam (and in our 2018 reunion year, Guest of Honor Anna-Marie McLemore represented lovers). We looked at representation of romantic and erotic ideas in speculative spaces, across different sexualities, including the notion of taking those things on your terms, which sometimes means not taking them at all.

In 2016, we suggested a number of books that portrayed romantic and sexual relationships. For Sirens at Home, though, we want to feature 10 books that we think have something to say about what it means to be, or not be, a lover, in a variety of different ways. Here are those books, as well as their opening words—and we’ve included links to those works at Bookshop in the titles. Bookshop supports both Sirens and independent bookstores, so if you’re looking to purchase any of these titles, they’re a great option!

1. Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam
	“Sené. Pregnant Sené. Sené of the tired skin. Sené whose face held a million wrinkles, each one etched deeply as if carved over the course of forty years. Sené whose blood was only twenty-four years young.”
2. Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri
	“Mehr woke up to a soft voice calling her name. Without thought, she reached a hand beneath her pillow and closed her fingers carefully around the hilt of her dagger. She could feel the smoothness of the large opal embedded in the hilt, and its familiar weight beneath her fingertips calmed her. She sat up and pushed back the layer of gauze surrounding her divan.”
3. Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
	“Joan has been searching for her missing husband, Victor, for nearly a year—ever since that terrible night they’d had their first serious argument and he’d mysteriously vanished. Her Métis family has lived in their tightly knit rural community for generations, but no one keeps the old ways … until they have to. That moment has arrived for Joan.”
4. Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks
	“In the border regions of northern Shaftal, the peaks of the mountains loom over hardscrabble farmholds. The farmers there build with stone and grow in stone, and they might even be made of stone themselves, they are so sturdy in the face of the long, bitter winter that comes howling down at them from the mountains.”
5. Song of Blood and Stone by L. Penelope
	“In the beginning, there was silence. The melody of life and breath and heartbeats and change lay locked in a noiseless hush. No green shoots worked their way out of rocky soil. The parched earth was sterile, yearning for change.”
6. The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh
	“New Orleans is a city ruled by the dead. I remember the moment I first heard someone say this. The old man meant to frighten me. He said there was a time when coffins sprang from the ground following a heavy rain, the dead flooding the city streets. He claimed to know of a Créole woman on Rue Dauphine who could commune with spirits from the afterlife.”
7. The Four Profound Weaves by R.B. Lemberg
	“I sat alone in my old goatskin tent. Waiting, like I had for the last forty years, for Aunt Benesret to come back. Waiting to inherit her loom and her craft, the mastery of the Four Profound Weaves. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting like this, and it was dark in the tent; I no longer knew day from night.”
8. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
	“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”
9. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
	“When Red wins, she stands alone. Blood slicks her hair. She breathes out steam in the last night of this dying world.”
10. When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore
	“As far as he knew, she had come from the water. But even about that, he couldn’t be sure. It didn’t matter how many nights they’d met on the untilled land between their houses; the last farm didn’t rotate its crops, and stripped the soil until nothing but wild grasses would grow. It didn’t matter how many stories he and Miel had told each other when they could not sleep, him passing on his mother’s fables of moon bears that aided lost travelers, Miel making up tales about his moon lamps falling in love with stars. Sam didn’t know any more than anyone else about where she’d come from before he found her in the brush field. She seemed to have been made of water one minute and the next, became a girl.”

For more information about our 2016 conference, including the programming presented that year, please see our 2016 archive page.