Thirst for Salt

January 16, 2023
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. Agent: Samantha Shea, George Borchardt.

January 15, 2023
Australian writer Lucas' debut charts the tides of love, memory, and longing as it explores not why love ends but how it ebbs and flows. The novel opens with the narrator's discovery, found through online sleuthing, that a former lover is now a father. She casts back to when she was 24, on vacation with her mother at Sailors Beach. Swimming alone, she encounters Jude, a former actor almost 20 years her senior who lives nearby and restores furniture. Their attraction is immediate, like an undertow. The narrator, an aspiring writer, whom Jude calls "Sharkbait," then "love," quickly trades her dreams of travel for the desire that Jude awakens in her, making "everything suddenly unbearably erotic, alive." Their intimacy is compelling in its urgency while also leaving room for silence as they navigate the tension between Jude's perspective that love is "a gift" and the narrator's understanding of it as a "need." When they find a dog on the beach, it becomes a stand-in for their bond, as a child would; and though the narrator dreams of a baby, she finds herself counseling Maeve, a potential rival, about a pregnancy. Throughout, the narrator reflects on her relationship with her mother; at times, these passages eclipse the love story: "As a child, I'd imagined her as something diffuse, like vapor or air. Nec-essary, and all around me, but somehow elusive, ungraspable." Water imagery is everywhere, threatening to make the novel's metaphors predictable: Orgasms are waves, as is grief, and the ocean and the shore are lovers. While Lucas' meditation on relationships is masterful, the ending falls flat--in a book where love leaves an indelible mark, it's hard to believe that the final conflict sets its characters adrift. Though its metaphors are familiar, Lucas' portrayal of love and desire exerts a wonderful pull.

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March 1, 2023
On vacation with her mother in an Australian beach town not far from her mother's home, the unnamed narrator in Lucas' mesmerizing debut novel sheds her anxieties as she swims. Having just graduated from college with a degree in literature and only the haziest of notions about her future, she gives herself over to the bewitchment of the sandy coast, the pressing sun, the muscled, moody ocean, the taunting wind, and the lashing rain. With her father long-absent, she and her young, pretty mother have essentially raised each other. The handsome, self-possessed man who swims out to where she is floating beyond the crash of the breakers, a furniture restorer who runs an antique shop in the tiny tourist town, is her mother's age and should be courting her, but instead he and the daughter embark on a wave-rocked affair. 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.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 31, 2023

DEBUT At 37, the unnamed narrator in Lucas's first novel looks back on a life-changing relationship that began during the summer she was 24 and Jude was 42. She had just graduated from university in Sydney and was on holiday with her mother at Sailor's Beach, where Jude restored antiques and was rehabbing his rough cabin. She wanted to go to grad school, while he was satisfied with his life in the small coastal town and the rapid intensity of their passion threatened to upend both of their futures. Over the next year, they fought to stay together, pushing back against the ingrained, complicated relationships of their individual past lives and the roadblocks that plague May-December romances, until a set of tragedies sealed their fate. What results is an irresistible postmortem on the courage required of two people tangled in an intense relationship that, like the aerodynamically challenged bumblebee, shouldn't be able to fly. VERDICT With the eye of an artist and the heart of a poet, Lucas brings to life two enchanting, magnificently flawed characters as tied to the wild beauty of Australia as they are to each other.--Beth E. Andersen

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 7, 2023
Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel opens with the unnamed female narrator, now 37 years old, recalling a past lover. Twenty-four years old at the time and holidaying with her mother, the narrator meets Jude while swimming at Sailors Beach. Although he is 18 years her senior, on their second meeting she follows him through the bush to his home and so begins an intense love affair. From the beginning we know the relationship does not last, yet its pull clearly does, and Lucas’s prose—lyrical, immediate, mesmerising—has us needing to know why. The mother-daughter relationship is a prominent theme; the narrator is driven by the same personal mythology as her mother ‘that love could restore what was beyond repair’. In an attempt to fill the gaps from a fragmented childhood marked by parental absence and instability, the narrator moves in with Jude, drawn to the quiet simplicity of life in the Old House. But not all is as it appears with Jude. As her expectations of love are challenged, she must choose a path forward. The narrative brims with imagery of the ocean and bush, sweeping along with a quiet melancholy that brings to mind Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow. Seductive and sparklingly clear, Thirst for Salt is an unforgettable meditation on memory, loss and the power of love to endure.