The twenty-four-year-old unnamed narrator of Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel Thirst for Salt is on holiday with her mother at a remote location, Sailors Beach, somewhere in southern Australia when she meets Jude, a man 18 years her senior.

When we met, Jude and I had marveled at the symmetry of our ages. Written down in my diary–24 42–they looked like a palindrome or a post code from an outer Sydney suburb. 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.

The girl is adrift. She’s graduated from university, lives in a dumpy apartment with a couple roommates and has to travel across the city to work in a bookstore. Jude offers her something she didn’t even know she was looking for, but soon utterly consumes her.

Who is to say what love is or what it wants to be, the shape it takes, or how quickly it comes on. Love has always made a fool of time.

Soon enough, the girl is living with Jude and imagining a future with him, a life that eventually includes a stray dog they find. There’s talk of a baby. It seems that Jude offers a strange sort of stability for her, even though he actually seems sort of flaky.

We know from the beginning of the novel that the narrator and Jude are not together and that she is telling this story of this one very particular time in her life from some years in the future. She is back in Australia after some time in the States and sees Jude’s picture in a magazine. He is holding “a dark-haired little girl. Three or four years old. […] Jude’s lips. […]It was something in the way he held her–that’s how I knew she was his.”

The narrator’s predicament will be relatable to anyone who has ever loved someone deeply, and then lost them. Not acrimoniously, just a drifting away despite the love. Looking back, the narrator is able to see her youthfulness and immaturity, but also Jude’s flaws.

Nothing much happens in the book. It’s not that kind of book. It’s a book about not only “the reasons that love ends but the way it endures.” I thought it was beautiful.