The Sirens

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, sexual assault, and death.

Lucy Martin is one of the protagonists and point-of-view characters in the novel. In the present-day timeline of the novel, where most of the action takes place over a few days in February 2019, Lucy is around 20 years old. She is a student in a competitive program at Hamilton Hume University and has wanted to study journalism for most of her life. She is fascinated by mysteries and worked hard to be accepted to university, though her parents did not initially support her career choice.

Lucy’s character arc involves Discovering and Expressing Oneself, and the novel begins with an event that strikes at the heart of her insecurities. For much of her life, Lucy has tried not to pay too much attention to her body. She believes the diagnosis of her skin condition to be aquatic urticaria and, for this reason, tries to avoid water. She uses moist towelettes to clean herself and keeps her blonde hair short, so she doesn’t have to wash it. Having sex with Ben, her first sexual experience, was important to Lucy because it made her feel at home in her body in a new way.