Thirst for Salt

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."Lush and gorgeous. . . . a delicious read, beautifully written and emotionally satisfying."—The New York Times Book Review

"Sensuous and bittersweet. . . . It offers an honest, often beautiful reminder of the overwhelming emotions that all of us have felt but spend most of our daily lives trying to subdue."—The Wall Street Journal

"Lucas’ meditation on relationships is masterful. . . . [her] portrayal of love and desire exerts a wonderful pull."—Kirkus Reviews

"A mesmerizing portrait of a romance with graceful, seductive writing. . . . This novel has a sea glass quality—time-worn, beautiful, worth holding onto."—Bustle

"Seductive and tender. . . . an engrossing page-turner."—Debutiful, A Best Debut Book of 2023 So Far

"Luscious and melancholy. . . . Sensual and electric."—Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

"Mesmerizing. . . . Lucas’ rolling, gleaming, beguiling prose is saturated with desire."—Booklist

"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."—Publishers Weekly

"Lucas is a wonderful writer."—LitHub

"Captivating. . . . this debut novel about a long-ago love affair revels in the lyrical language that describes its rugged landscape and the emotional intensity of new love."—Shelf Awareness

"Timeless. . . . an atmospheric beach-escape of a novel."—Chicago Review of Books

"Both sensual and heartbreaking."—The Adroit Journal

"Simple and direct but wise and textured, letting you linger on sandy legs, salty breezes, jellyfish stings, slipping swimsuit straps, silver temples, and the push and pull of doomed affair."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Profound. . . . Lucas writes with a poetic precision that captures the sharp and mellow edges of love, as well as its intersections with grief."—Zyzzyva

"Addictive. . . . Lucas has drawn a richly psychological study of love that doesn’t rely on clichés or standard power imbalances."—NYLON

"With shades of Françoise Sagan, this debut novel explores the complexities of young seduction, love, and the unending desire for connection."—Departures

"Mesmerizing, sensuous, and lyrical."—Zibby Owens, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books Podcast

"Gorgeous. . . . a surprisingly earnest though never sentimental story of first love."—Washington Independent Review of Books

"Deeply beautiful writing and layered thematics. Fans of Marguerite Duras, Joan Didion, Jean Rhys, and Raymond Carver will find some fun literary allusions to explore. . . . This is fiction to be savored."—Necessary Fiction

"Richly imagined, lyrically rendered, and stunningly sensuous."—The Millions

"Reading Lucas’s novel is an intimate act, as the narrator’s wise, emotionally perceptive observations create a world rich and vivid enough to live in."—BOMB

"Thirst for Salt is an exquisite, magnificent gem of a book. While Madelaine Lucas’s style is delicate and spare, her story is one of searing power—the story of a young woman’s exploration of the fraught, often dangerous, forces of love, motherhood, art, and wilderness. Thirst for Salt is a revelation, with a quietly radical view of female desire and independence, and Lucas is a brilliant new voice—compassionate, daring, heartbreaking. It’s no surprise that she is also an acclaimed musician, for this debut novel is full of verve and beauty, and it stays with you like a charged, lingering melody."—Rebecca Godfrey, bestselling author of Under the Bridge

"This novel is a beautiful, melancholy tide. I felt inexorably pulled to it, and by it. Lucas is a brilliant conjurer of emotional and bodily longing. I felt, while avidly turning the pages, that briny tightness of the skin, as though I’d sat in the hot sun after an ocean swim. Thirst for Salt is a sensuous, visceral debut." —Heidi Julavits

"Madelaine Lucas’s Thirst for Salt gripped me immediately, with the tender acuity of its voice and the propulsive electricity of the relationship at its core: a love affair so richly and attentively imagined it carries the grace and gravity of memory itself. It’s a novel whose momentum emerges not from melodrama but from the primal mysteries of human intimacy: How do people come together and come apart? Every once in a while, a novel enters my life that I know is destined to become part of my bloodstream. Thirst for Salt is one of those novels and I’m so excited to think of it finding its way to readers who will be changed by it." —Leslie JamisonMadelaine Lucas is a senior editor of NOON and teaches fiction at Columbia University. She is from Sydney, Australia, and lives in Brooklyn.When we met, Jude and I had marveled at the symmetry of our ages. Written down in my diary—24 42—they looked like a palindrome or a postcode from an outer Sydney suburb. 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.

I had gone down south on a holiday with my mother that summer to Sailors Beach. A watery place, surrounded by the bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, a place we had not visited since I was a child. It would be just the two of us again, for the first time since my younger brother was born. Our family an ever-tangling web and men the loose threads left hanging, but not our Henry, not yet. Man of the house, we teased, though he was still a boy then, only twelve. He belonged to us except for the month of January, gone fishing with his father up north, and we hoped he would return uncorrupted by the silent, absent ways of all the other men who passed in and out of our lives.

Back then, my mother had only recently moved to her house in the mountains, and though she often said she was used to life without a man around—preferred it, even—being at home without a child was something else, and I think she did not like the idea of spending weeks in the new place alone. She was repainting, she’d told me when she called a few weeks before the New Year, and the fumes were giving her a headache. Plus, there was something about the way the tree branches scraped at the windows in the hot breeze. The smell of paint, the heat—it played tricks on her mind. She had seen the garden hose coiled on the concrete back steps take the shape of a brown snake baking in the sun, right beside her boots.

Though my mother is older now and has settled, she has always had a tendency to talk of houses the way other people talk about lovers: This is it this time, I’ve found the one, I can feel it. Her wandering eye for a Victorian terrace, or an aging Australian bungalow built in the California style. All her new beginnings took the shape of freshly painted walls, a roof under which nothing bad had ever happened. No wine spilled on the carpet, no fist-shaped hole through the drywall. I think she liked the work of it—ripping up a garden gone to seed, peeling back flaking wallpaper, stripping the paint from the floors to reveal a dusty golden pine or wide boards of solid Tasmanian oak. The strength it takes to bring an old house back from the brink of ruin, bringing in the light, the air. Water and seeds out for the birds. That kind of work, she said, it makes you believe that change is possible. You can see the difference you made, and all for the better too.

That was my mother—dreaming in blueprints, ever since I was conceived beneath the bare wooden bones of an unfinished house on a construction site in suburban Melbourne where my father worked as a laborer during the day and slept sometimes, after hours. She was in her last year of art school then and living in her childhood home, so my parents made love in sawdust, a blue tarpaulin slapping against the empty frame in the winter wind that blew in sharp off the Tasman Sea, moon shining through the crossbeams. Brushing sawdust from their hair. My parents separated sometime between my third and fourth birthday—young enough for me to have few memories of them together, but I had my mother’s stories, repeated over the years until they gained the quality of myth.