Thirst For Salt A Novel Madelaine Lucas by Madelaine Lucas 9781953534729, 1953534724 instant download after payment.

A Bustle, LitHub, Debutiful, & NYLON Most Anticipated Book of 2023

"A love affair so richly & attentively imagined it carries the grace & 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 & 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 & 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 & the one she wants.

A magnetic & unforgettable story of desire & its complexities, & a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, & 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 & what we love.

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“This novel is a beautiful, melancholy tide. I felt inexorably pulled to it, & by it. Lucas is a brilliant conjurer of emotional & 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

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Madelaine Lucas is a senior editor of NOON & teaches fiction at Columbia University. She is from Sydney, Australia, & lives in Brooklyn.