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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...

Review

Thirteen years after the end of a love affair, a writer in New York types the name of her former lover into a search engine and finds a portrait of him holding a small dark-haired daughter on a farm in Tasmania. The novel that unfolds from that single, wounding image is not the story of a relationship so much as an archaeology of the self it left behind. Madelaine Lucas’s Thirst for Salt is a book about what endures after love ends—about the inherited patterns of desire that run through the women of a family, and about the deliberate refusal to repeat one’s mother’s life turning out to be just as formative as the pattern itself. It is a novel of water and salt, of houses built and burned, of a dog named King, and of an abortion that does not close a chapter so much as etch its absence into the narrator’s body. Its real subject is not the older man, Jude, but the narrator’s long and unfinished reckoning with the child she chose not to have and the woman she chose not to become.

The book is built in three named sections, with a present-day frame set in the Blue Mountains, where the narrator—thirty-seven, recovering from a fertility diagnosis that tells her she has far fewer eggs than she expected—has returned to her mother’s house. She is sleeping in the room she shared with her younger half-brother Henry when she was twenty-four, writing at her dead grandmother’s writing desk, and the discovery of Jude’s photograph sends her back to the summer she was that age and went on holiday with her mother to Sailors Beach, a small coastal town on the New South Wales south coast. There, swimming alone in the ocean, she was seen by a man eighteen years her senior—a woodworker and antiques dealer rebuilding the unfinished kit house his father left behind. “In the water, I was graceful, a light and buoyant thing,” she tells us. “I knew this to be my better self, the most fully alive.” The affair begins in salt water, and Lucas never lets us forget that the medium of their connection is also the medium of longing itself. The epigraph from Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas”—“Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances”—names the thirst that gives the novel its title, and the book’s great intelligence is to show how that thirst predates Jude, passes through him, and survives him.

The summer romance is rendered in precise, sensory prose that understands intimacy as a problem of attention. Lucas moves between the ease of the couple in the ocean and their awkwardness on land, where “there was no need for conversation then.” The narrator conceals the affair from her mother, who is wary of the age gap—the mother herself had the narrator at twenty-four with a nomadic, gambling older man who soon disappeared—and Lucas plants the seeds of the novel’s central argument early: that desire is something daughters inherit. The narrator’s grandmother Sylvia, a doctor’s wife abandoned for a graduate student, cut off her own ring finger when the wedding band would not come off over her swollen knuckle; the narrator’s mother still writes letters to track the absent father she left. The narrator, at twenty-four, has already internalized a model of love as a thing one cannot do without, and Jude, with his theory of “love with a loose leash,” is both its perfect object and its perfect foil. “He needed not to feel bound to anyone,” she will later summarize. “To Jude, that was love. That trust. He needed my faith in him in order to feel free.” The novel’s central thematic conflict—whether love is freedom or need, and whether those two definitions can inhabit the same relationship—is established before the first section closes, in Jude’s parting remark about sharks: “What we might be tempted to call fate is really just a matter of convenience.”

The second section deepens the relationship and widens its cracks. The narrator leaves her share house in the Inner West, her bookstore job, her vague plans for Europe, and takes the train down to Sailors Beach, moving into Jude’s Old House. They find an aging stray dog they name King, fashioning his tag from an old belt, and form a precarious household of three. Lucas draws this domestic life with a tenderness that makes its fragility palpable—the dog who refuses to let anyone he loves out of his sight becomes a silent rebuke to Jude’s whole philosophy of attachment. The narrator also befriends Maeve, Jude’s old friend, who is pregnant by Willy, Jude’s oldest friend, and whose swelling body begins to stand in for everything the narrator does not yet know she wants. “I could love a child, I realized,” she will later say, but for now the child is Maeve’s, and Maeve’s closeness to Jude gnaws at her. The prose here is careful to register both the narrator’s jealousy and the way her neediness distorts her perception. When Jude casually quotes John Donne—“No man is an island”—and she fires back, “No man is an island, but every woman is,” the retort is clever but also defensive, a shield against the vulnerability of needing someone who needs to be free. The section builds toward the night on the beach when she sees Jude cup Maeve’s face in his hands, and she flees in his truck, accidentally leaving King behind. The scene is a masterclass in the way Lucas uses withheld information—we do not know whether the gesture was romantic or comforting, and the ambiguity is the point, because the narrator herself does not know, cannot know, and will be haunted by not knowing.

Section Three traces the long dissolution and its aftermath. King dies on Christmas Day, of heart failure, and the death undoes whatever threads had held the narrator and Jude together. Back at her mother’s house in the Blue Mountains, the narrator discovers she is pregnant and, “refusing to repeat her mother’s young single motherhood,” has an abortion alone. It is the novel’s most deliberate act, and Lucas writes it without melodrama, as a decision that is both clear-eyed and devastating. Meanwhile, Jude—drunk, grieving the dog—burns the Old House to the ground, a gesture the narrator reads less as destruction than as erasure, the final proof that he “treats me like a light thing. Loving things loosely and then letting them go.” Maeve later visits to confess that the kiss on the beach was real but was “comfort, not passion,” and that Jude had said he loved the narrator, but the information cannot close the wound. “What continues to surprise me,” the narrator reflects near the end, “and what I still don’t understand, is not the reasons that love ends but the way that it endures.” The novel’s final image—the narrator, her mother, and the now-grown Henry walking a bush track scarred by fire, losing and finding one another around the bends—echoes the tidal rhythm the book has been tracking all along.

Lucas’s first-person retrospective narration belongs to a tradition of literary fiction that treats women’s interior lives as serious intellectual and emotional terrain—a lineage that runs through Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, which the narrator carries to the beach on the day she meets Jude, and through the cool, appraising sentences of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, which she reads on her mother’s couch after the separation. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping hovers in the epigraph, with its comparison of craving and having to a thing and its shadow, and the book’s central concern with maternal inheritance places it in conversation with a feminist tradition that interrogates how desire and domestic patterns are passed from woman to woman. The cross-references Lucas names in her acknowledgments are the scaffolding of a consciousness that thinks through art: Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), in which an artist allows strangers to cut the clothes from her body, mirrors the narrator’s own self-abnegation in love; Joy Hester’s drawing “Two Sunken Lovers Bodies Lay,” seen years later in a New York gallery, returns her to the drowned feeling of Sailors Beach. The novel is saturated with these references, and they risk feeling like undergraduate name-dropping, but Lucas earns them by making them functional—the books the narrator reads are not displays of taste but evidence of the stories she is trying to fit her experience into, and of the failure of those stories to contain it.

What the novel does less well is give the narrator a self outside her longing. She is a consciousness more than a character—we know she swam competitively as a child, that she studied literature, that she wanted to travel, but these details remain sketchy, subordinate to the one relationship that organizes her entire retrospective vision. Jude, too, remains opaque, which is partly the point—he is seen only through her desiring gaze—but there are moments when the novel seems to grant him a depth it has not earned, as if his silence were synonymous with wisdom. The prose can also lean too hard on its motifs: water, salt, sharks, birds, fire, and ruins recur with a deliberateness that sometimes tips from resonant into overdetermined. When the narrator tells us that “absence contours the body,” the line lands perfectly the first time; by the time it has been echoed through the absent father, the aborted child, the burned house, and the disappeared lover, it has done the work it can do. Lucas is a writer of evident talent, but this debut sometimes mistakes reiteration for deepening.

Yet the novel’s power does not depend on subtlety. It depends on the raw, sustained investigation of a single question: whether a woman can choose differently from the women who made her, and what it costs her to try. The narrator’s abortion is the novel’s clearest answer to its own question—she refuses to become her mother, to be a single parent at twenty-four, to build her life around an absent man—and yet the refusal does not free her. It produces its own kind of haunting, its own shape of absence. “I could love a child, I realized. I had the capacity, the space inside, it was my brother who’d first taught me how.” The sentence is not a regret exactly; it is an acknowledgment of a capacity that will go unused, a space that will remain open, and the novel’s great achievement is to treat that open space with the same seriousness it grants to the love affair that precipitated it. In the present frame, the photograph of Jude as a gentle father—the softness the narrator could never draw out of him—reopens the question of the life she did not have, and Lucas refuses to resolve it. The home the narrator wanted, one house holding everyone she loves, was never possible, and the novel’s closing wisdom is that home can be carried and remade, that grief and love are twins without end.

Thirst for Salt is a novel for readers who understand that some relationships do not end so much as they become internal weather—that a love affair at twenty-four can set the emotional key for the next thirteen years, and that the decisions a woman makes about her body and her future are inseparable from the stories her mother and grandmother lived before her. It is a book that takes seriously the idea that desire is a form of inheritance, and it earns its place in the realist literary tradition by refusing to flinch from the mess that inheritance leaves behind. If it occasionally overexplains its own symbolism, it also achieves passages of clear, sorrowful beauty that feel hard-won, the product of a narrator who has spent half her life learning how to tell the story she is telling. The novel’s final wonder—not why love ends but why it endures—is not a neat conclusion. It is an honest one.