Madelaine Lucas’s gorgeous debut opens with her unnamed narrator’s discovery of a photo of a man with a little girl: his daughter. She recognises him – Jude, older now than when his life was knotted with hers – the man she loved and who loved her the summer she turned 24 and for several blissful months after. Yearning and regret mingle as Lucas plunges into the past, to her now 37-year-old narrator’s melancholy memories of a holiday with her mum, in fictional Sailors Beach on the NSW south coast, an interlude between the end of university and the future.

One day, during that summer sojourn, she spots 42-year-old Jude swimming. On the next day, he approaches her on the sand and calls her ‘sharkbait’, because she stays out until sundown. He’s seen her before. There’s an immediate spark. She dreams of him, waking fevered, ‘Everything,’ she recalls, ‘suddenly unbearably erotic, alive.’ They circle each other; become lovers. When she returns to her Sydney share house and part-time bookshop job, they talk on the phone and visit on weekends. Hungry for love and the stability absent in her peripatetic childhood, when Jude asks her to live with him in Sailors Beach she doesn’t hesitate to say yes.

This is one of the best Australian debuts I have read in a long time. Lucas writes beautifully of the intimacy of cohabitation; memories of the narrator’s daily life with Jude create their own hypnotic, wave-like rhythms, textured with sensual details of wild bushland, water, and the changing seasons. Lucas avoids tired tropes about older men and younger women – there is deep empathy here, flowing between author and characters, and between the characters themselves. Lucas understands what animates their imperfect hearts. Writing about sex, especially such formative experiences, can be fraught with problems. But Lucas is gifted at capturing desire’s burning physical and emotional landscapes, rendering both with subtlety and precision.

Thirst for Salt is a mature and complex novel. It’s a love story in the richest sense, an exploration of how it feels to be alive – exactly what it is that we talk about when we talk about love.