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, this 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 woman from Jude’s past, threatens to rock the fragility of their newfound intimacy. And when she witnesses something doesn’t fully understand between Maeve and Jude, she finds herself questioning everything–about Jude, about herself, about the life she has and the one she wants.

Years later, when a photograph of Jude with a young child–presumably his own–comes to the surface, she finds herself drawn back to the events that took place at Sailors Beach and the decisions made there that changed the course of both of their lives. A sensuous and unforgettable debut, Madelaine Lucas’s Thirst for Salt is an electrifying, mesmerizing love story that lingers with powerful, aching emotional depth.