Tomi Adeyemi is stepping away from the ancestral magic of Orïsha for something she calls “Soul Magic.” Her first standalone novel The Siren publishes September 29 from Henry Holt and Company, marking a sharp departure from the West African fantasy trilogy that made her a three-time instant #1 New York Times bestseller. This time, she’s trading sweeping epic fantasy for dark academia set at Dartmouth University, where a Nigerian American teenager named Emery arrives determined to keep her scholarship, take her meds, and bury the past she left behind.

That plan unravels when Emery meets Roux along with her disarming stepbrother Eli and a mystical group called The Sirens. These girls live shrouded in extravagance and secret parties, their campus lives as alluring as their name suggests. Before they were Sirens, they were outcasts. Under Roux, their wildest dreams came true. When Roux offers Emery the chance to join them, Emery discovers there are deadly bargains involved, and she’ll do whatever it takes to make it in. The publisher describes the book as blending shocking contemporary storytelling with sinister dark academic flair, a blockbuster about rage, longing, and a woman’s darkness.

In an interview with Cosmopolitan, Adeyemi described The Siren as “the book of my soul,” the story came from “a gentle place.” She distinguishes the magic in this book from the ancestral power that animated the Legacy of Orïša series. It’s the rawest, most heartbreaking thing she’s ever written, she said, suggesting readers should brace themselves for something more intimate and contemporary than the epic battles and divine magic of her debut trilogy. “This is a category-defying, genre-bending novel. It is beautiful, ugly, fantastic, real, raw, horrifying, romantic, and we can’t wait for you to read it. ” said Jean Feiwel, Senior Vice-President and Publisher.

The timing positions Adeyemi at an interesting crossroads. Her Children of Blood and Bone film adaptation, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and starring Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Regina King, and Idris Elba, hits theaters January 15, 2027. With that spectacle on the horizon, The Siren reads like Adeyemi claiming space to explore darker, more personal terrain before the Orïša universe explodes across screens worldwide. For readers who’ve followed her from Zélie’s revolutionary journey through three books, this standalone offers a chance to see what Adeyemi does when she turns the camera inward.

The Siren is available for preorder now and publishes September 29, 2026.