“Lush and gorgeous. . . . a delicious read, beautifully written and emotionally satisfying.” - The New York Times
Thirst For Salt
Buy now“A love affair so richly and attentively imagined it carries the grace and gravity of memory itself.” - Leslie Jamison
Publicity inquiries, contact
Becky Kraemer, becky@tinhouse.com
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
A Bustle, Debutiful, Literary Hub and NYLON Most Anticipated Book of 2023
A Goodreads Buzziest Book of the New Year
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.
Buy THIRST FOR SALT
Buy Thirst For Salt
United States & Canada
Australia & New Zealand
UNITED KINGDOM
SELECT Praise for Thirst for Salt
“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
“Mesmerizing, sensuous, and lyrical.”
— ZIBBY OWENS (MOMS DON’T HAVE TIME TO READ BOOKS PODCAST)
“Timeless. . . . an atmospheric beach-escape of a novel.”
— CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS
“Richly imagined, lyrically rendered, and stunningly sensuous.”
— THE MILLIONS
“Lucas’ meditation on relationships is masterful. . . . [her] portrayal of love and desire exerts a wonderful pull.”
— KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Seductive and tender. . . . an engrossing page-turner.”
— DEBUTIFUL
“Thirst for Salt paints a mesmerizing portrait of a romance with graceful, seductive writing… This novel has a sea glass quality — time-worn, beautiful, worth holding onto.”
— BUSTLE
“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 JAMISON
“Addictive. . . . Lucas has drawn a richly psychological study of love that doesn’t rely on clichés or standard power imbalances.”
— NYLON
“Gorgeous. . . . a surprisingly earnest though never sentimental story of first love.”
— WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS
“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
“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
“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
Photograph by Kylie Coutts, 2021
Madelaine Lucas is the author of the debut novel Thirst For Salt and a senior editor of NOON. Born in 1990, she was raised in Melbourne and Sydney as the daughter of a visual artist and a rock ‘n’ roll musician. In 2015, she moved to New York to complete her MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where she now teaches in the undergraduate and graduate writing programs.
Her essays and interviews have appeared in publications such as Paris Review Daily, The Believer, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Lifted Brow and Meanjin, and her fiction has been awarded the Elizabeth Jolley Prize and the Overland/Victoria University Emerging Writer’s Prize. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog, Pancho.
Madelaine’s writing is represented by Samantha Shea of Georges Borchardt, Inc.