Cirrus@Austlit

'As an editor, my role is to look over every word with a discerning and scrupulous eye. As a writer, it’s hard to switch the critical mind off.'

'Show Your Working is a regular column exploring how some of our favourite writers get things done. In this instalment, we take a peek into the writing routine of author, editor and creative writing lecturer Madelaine Lucas, whose debut novel Thirst For Salt is out this month from Allen & Unwin.' (Introduction)

'When Madelaine Lucas’s parents broke up, their home wasn’t broken. Instead, it became malleable and expansive – and taught her how love can endure'

'A compelling and unforgettable debut novel by an acclaimed young Australian writer—a mesmerising story of desire and its complexities and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss and longing.

' 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.

'She first sees him in the water: 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, the 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 when she witnesses something she doesn't fully understand, she finds herself questioning everything—about Jude, about herself, about the life she has and the one she wants.

'Thirst for Salt reveals with stunning, sensual immediacy the way the past can hold us in its thrall, shaping who we are and what we love.' (Publication summary)