Jude calls her “Sharkbait” when he first sees her, swimming in the ocean. It’s the only name we ever know her by, the narrator of Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel Thirst for Salt. She meets Jude in the year of her 24th birthday, holidaying down the coast with her mother. Jude is almost 20 years her senior and lives alone, a charming bachelor with an penchant for antique furniture. The pull of their attraction is instant and raw, and the two fall into a love affair that continues for almost a year. Their time together is powerful and deeply formative and one the narrator reflects on, years later, when she stumbles across a photo of her once lover with his child, the marker of the family he created without her.
Lucas, an Australian author living and teaching in New York, writes as if she’s telling the story at a dinner party, with a lingering pace and an easy familiarity with the characters. As she recalls the intimate details of this fictional lost love, Lucas draws thematic lines between the romantic relationships women have with men and the (perhaps more complex) relationships they have with their mothers and other women in their lives. Lucas has amplified this tension by positioning the narrator’s lover and her mother at similar ages, allowing them to compete for her attention from similar points of experience.
