Thirst for Salt

Written by Madelaine Lucas

Narrated by Madelaine Lucas

It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in myred 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781705095928

Madelaine Lucas

Madelaine Lucas was born in Melbourne and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a senior editor of the literary annual NOON, and a graduate of the fiction MFA programme at Columbia University. Her essays and interviews have appeared in publications including Paris Review Daily, The Believer and Literary Hub, 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.

Reviews for Thirst for Salt

[pedro ramírez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very much enjoyed my time with this book!! The narration was on point and very much mirrored the style, the pace that was laid out on the text ???

[Leah Barton Tew · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I usually avoid books narrated by the author because they tend to not use appropriate dynamics, which means the book comes across as either boring or difficult to follow or both. This book is no exception. As a result, I kept losing track of what was going on (lack of dynamics makes it very easy to get distracted or to lose important details) or I kept dozing off and losing entire passages.