Thirst for Salt
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4.2 • 12 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Bustle, LitHub, Debutiful, and NYLON Most Anticipated Book of 2023
A Goodreads Buzziest Book of the New Year
“A love affair so richly and attentively imagined it carries the grace and gravity of memory itself.” —Leslie Jamison
It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait, he called me.
It’s in the water where she first sees him: a local man almost twenty years her senior. Adrift in the summer after finishing college, a young woman is on holiday with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Finding herself pulled to Jude, the man in the water, she begins losing herself in the simple, seductive rhythms of his everyday life.
As their relationship deepens, life at Sailors Beach offers her the stability she has been craving as the daughter of two drifters—a loving but impulsive mother and an itinerant father. But the arrival of Maeve, a friend from Jude’s past, threatens to rock their fragile, newfound intimacy. And when she witnesses something she doesn’t fully understand, she finds herself questioning everything—about Jude, about herself, about the life she has and the one she wants.
A magnetic and unforgettable story of desire and its complexities, and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, and longing, Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel, Thirst for Salt, reveals with stunning, sensual immediacy the way the past can hold us in its thrall, shaping who we are and what we love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian writer Lucas's intelligent debut tracks a love affair between a young woman and an older man. The unnamed narrator, now 37, reflects on the "pause" in her life between graduating from college at 24 and "whatever would happen next." She recounts a seaside vacation with her mother from that time, when she meets a local named Jude, 42. Soon, the two are sleeping together, and after she returns to her apartment in Sydney, they stay in touch, and she visits Jude on weekends before deciding to quit her part-time bookselling job and move in with him. The two adopt a stray dog and spend months living in bliss, but when the narrator suspects Jude of having feelings for an older female friend, and he bristles at the idea of introducing the narrator to his mother, the narrator second-guesses her devotion to him. There's not much of a plot involving this well-trod story of a fractured love affair, but Lucas keenly captures the relationship's slow erosion, as well as the narrator's ability to make sense of her past while looking back on it. The author's psychological acuity will keep readers piqued.
