Thirst
-
- €9.99
Publisher Description
________________________
'A terrifying thriller ... Visceral' - Entertainment Weekly
'An emergency from its very first sentence ... A literary thriller that summons the survivalist terror of The Road' - Patrick Somerville, author of This Bright River
________________________
WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF THE WATER RAN DRY?
On a searing summer evening, Eddie Chapman has been stuck in a traffic jam for hours. There are accidents along the highway, but ambulances and police are conspicuously absent. When he decides to abandon his car
and run home, he sees that the trees have been burned and the water in the stream bed is gone. Something is very wrong.
When he arrives home, there is a power cut and no running water. The pipes everywhere, it seems, are dry. Eddie and his wife, Laura, find themselves thrust together with their neighbours while a sense of unease thickens in the stifling night air.
Thirst takes place in the immediate aftermath of a mysterious disaster – the Chapmans and their community suffer the effects of the heat, their thirst and the terrifying realisation that no one is coming to help. As violence rips through the community, Eddie and Laura are forced to recall secrets from their past and question their present humanity. In crisp and convincing prose, Benjamin Warner compels readers to do the same.
________________________
'A timely, necessary, character-driven meditation on morality, society, and responsibility. Thirst presses us, accuses and implicates us in the failures of its characters' - Chicago Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Warner's debut novel is the story of a young married couple, Eddie and Laura Chapman, and their fight for survival after a mysterious power outage and the sudden, inexplicable absence of drinkable water. Eddie is caught in traffic when the disaster strikes; he decides to abandon his car and run the rest of the distance home. He encounters an unexpectedly dry streambed along the way, the first sign that something has gone terribly wrong, and when he finally makes it home, the full extent of the dire situation becomes clear. He's reunited with Laura and a few other neighbors who decide to wait for help instead of heading into the city. They all slowly succumb to a desperate thirst that threatens to unravel them both mentally and physically. The fight for water becomes increasingly desperate, and neighbors battle over resources with disastrous consequences. With a tight focus and a steadily increasing tension, the novel explores the limits of what we would give up of our humanity in order to survive. Warner achieves a chillingly claustrophobic atmosphere in which everything in the outside world becomes a threat. But in a market overflowing with post-apocalyptic stories, the novel never achieves the originality that it promises at the beginning, and the specific cause of the disaster remains frustratingly oblique.
