Skip to content

THIRST FOR SALT

Madelaine Lucas

THIRST FOR SALT is a heady, intoxicating exploration of age, of love and desire, and how women navigate their lives and relationships as mothers, daughters, friends, and lovers.
In THIRST FOR SALT, a beautifully evocative and quietly introspective novel, a young unnamed woman begins a love affair with Jude, a man nearly twenty years her senior. Set on a remote beach on the Australian coast, the narrator begins to neglect her other relationships as she grows closer to Jude, intent on peeling back his layers and desperate to be needed and loved with the utmost intensity. But when Jude's old friend Maeve enters their lives, the narrator feels that her and Jude's love is fragile, leading her to consider just what she'll do to preserve their tender, domestic intimacy. Years later, reflecting on this relationship, as well her childhood being raised by her impulsive, drifting mother, she begins to truly unravel and understand her own emotional and sexual coming of age. Madelaine Lucas was born in Melbourne in 1990 and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a senior editor of the literary annual NOON, and a recent graduate from the fiction MFA program at Columbia University. Her essays and interviews have appeared in publications such as Paris Review Daily, The Believer, Literary Hub and elsewhere, and her fiction has been awarded Australia's Elizabeth Jolley Prize. She teaches workshops for adults and young people in creative writing programs at Columbia University and Catapult.
Available products
Book

Published 2023-03-07 by Tin House

Comments

Exquisite... Lucas is a brilliant new voice - compassionate, daring, heartbreaking.

A sensuous, visceral debut.

Lucas' rolling, gleaming, beguiling prose is saturated with desire, sensuous bliss, worry, fear, and anger as her narrator looks back at her mother's life, her own childhood, and the highs and lows of her profoundly erotic, ultimately shipwrecked romance.

THIRST FOR SALT has been featured on Most Anticipated Novels of 2023 lists from Nylon, LitHub, and Debutiful.

A love affair so richly and attentively imagined it carries the grace and gravity of memory itself.

Both luscious and melancholy, Madelaine Lucas's novel sifts through the ashes of a woman's formative romantic relationship, unearthing the truths that she once evaded... The delicious and damning contours of a woman's first, passionate love are excavated in Thirst for Salt, a sun-soaked, nostalgic romance.

Lucas invites readers into a seductive and tender relationship with her debut novel. She captures the raw, instinctual lust we have at the beginning of relationships and exposes how we yearn for others. Thirst for Salt is an engrossing page-turned you will salivate to at every sentence.

UK: Hot Key Books; AUSNZ: Allen & Unwin

Intelligent... 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.

Australian writer Lucas' debut charts the fields of love, memory, and longing as it explores not why love ends but how it ebbs and flows... Lucas' portrayal of love and desire exerts a wonderful pull.