That summer

A debut novel captures the thrill of first love and the melancholy of its departure.

- CHERYL PEARL SUCHER

THIRST FOR SALT, by Madelaine Lucas (Allen & Unwin $36.99) is out on April 4. There is sensual pathos and emotional purity in the vivid, wistful remembrance of lost first love captured in Madelaine Lucas' debut novel, Thirst for Salt.

The nameless narrator has returned to her nomadic mother's home in New South Wales' Blue Mountains after years of living and teaching in New York and comes across a prizewinning photograph of her former older lover, Jude, whom she met when she was 24 and he was 42"their ages like a palindrome or a postcode from an outer Sydney suburb".

She has lost touch with Jude, who had little presence on social media, but she instantly recognises "the dark patch beneath each eye like a stain, a new vulnerability to his expression... his daughter overlooking a green valley at a farm or vineyard... low grey fog lingering above the hills like a memory of smoke". In that moment, time and distance collapsed and even though it was a beautiful photograph, she is surprised by how much it hurt, remembering how "if I had remained at Sailors Beach and I had a child with Jude, if I had married him, as I once imagined I would, my bridal train would have been made of salt and sand".