A Feast of Sorrows by Angela Slatter While calling Angela Slatter the heir apparent to Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue may seem a bold assertion, it’s appropriately so.

If you would like to purchase your books from, just follow the link in the book title. We are affiliated with, an online bookstore that provides economic support to both Sirens and independent bookstores nationwide. Instead, please select a comparable number of works from the list of additional books below. If you need to skip one or more of the works on this list for any reason, we understand.

Some of the works we’ve chosen include difficult content, such as sexual assault, self-harm, or racialized violence.

For each work that you’ve already read, please select a work from the list of additional works below.

Many of you will have already read some (or even many) of the selected 25 works.

We’ll give all timely finishers a special button, suitable for gloating, at Sirens.

Once you’re finished-and by no later than October 1, 2021-send an email to (help at ) with Reading Challenge as the subject line to let us know that you’ve finished the challenge. This year’s reading challenge is simple: Read the 25 works listed below by October 1, 2021. We’ll be ready to discuss at Sirens in 2021! Rules And some might be just the books you’ve been waiting for. When we ask ourselves what Sirens is, and what Sirens could be, we look to these works and others like them.

We find that these works demonstrate the true wonder of what speculative spaces can be-and what our real world can also be. This year, we carefully considered what that means to us, and we’ve selected 25 works by female, nonbinary, and trans authors envisioning that world. Sirens is a space that actively seeks to amplify voices that are pushing boundaries in speculative spaces-and specifically, are pushing those boundaries in the direction of a more inclusive, more empathetic, more just world. Since we ran our villains reading challenge in 2020, here’s something different for 2021!

We set the dark on fire summary