Thirst for salt A novel

Review by Booklist Review

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.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Mar.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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When we met, Jude and I had marveled at the symmetry of our ages. Written down in my diary--24 42--they looked like a palindrome or a postcode from an outer Sydney suburb. 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. I had gone down south on a holiday with my mother that summer to Sailors Beach. A watery place, surrounded by the bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, a place we had not visited since I was a child. It would be just the two of us again, for the first time since my younger brother was born. Our family an ever-tangling web and men the loose threads left hanging, but not our Henry, not yet. Man of the house, we teased, though he was still a boy then, only twelve. He belonged to us except for the month of January, gone fishing with his father up north, and we hoped he would return uncorrupted by the silent, absent ways of all the other men who passed in and out of our lives. Back then, my mother had only recently moved to her house in the mountains, and though she often said she was used to life without a man around--preferred it, even--being at home without a child was something else, and I think she did not like the idea of spending weeks in the new place alone. She was repainting, she'd told me when she called a few weeks before the New Year, and the fumes were giving her a headache. Plus, there was something about the way the tree branches scraped at the windows in the hot breeze. The smell of paint, the heat--it played tricks on her mind. She had seen the garden hose coiled on the concrete back steps take the shape of a brown snake baking in the sun, right beside her boots. Though my mother is older now and has settled, she has always had a tendency to talk of houses the way other people talk about lovers: This is it this time, I've found the one, I can feel it. Her wandering eye for a Victorian terrace, or an aging Australian bungalow built in the California style. All her new beginnings took the shape of freshly painted walls, a roof under which nothing bad had ever happened. No wine spilled on the carpet, no fist-shaped hole through the drywall. I think she liked the work of it--ripping up a garden gone to seed, peeling back flaking wallpaper, stripping the paint from the floors to reveal a dusty golden pine or wide boards of solid Tasmanian oak. The strength it takes to bring an old house back from the brink of ruin, bringing in the light, the air. Water and seeds out for the birds. That kind of work, she said, it makes you believe that change is possible. You can see the difference you made, and all for the better too. That was my mother--dreaming in blueprints, ever since I was conceived beneath the bare wooden bones of an unfinished house on a construction site in suburban Melbourne where my father worked as a laborer during the day and slept sometimes, after hours. She was in her last year of art school then and living in her childhood home, so my parents made love in sawdust, a blue tarpaulin slapping against the empty frame in the winter wind that blew in sharp off the Tasman Sea, moon shining through the crossbeams. Brushing sawdust from their hair. My parents separated sometime between my third and fourth birthday--young enough for me to have few memories of them together, but I had my mother's stories, repeated over the years until they gained the quality of myth. Excerpted from Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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