21 must-read fiction books like Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

Cover of Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

Thirst for Salt

By: Madelaine Lucas

3.84

Format: 272 pages, Paperback

A Bustle, LitHub, Debutiful, and NYLON Most Anticipated Book of 2023 A Goodreads Buzziest Book of t…

"As if it were possible to circumnavigate memory."

-Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

"I like you as you are, he said. Even if you're going to wear me out."

-Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

"As lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past."

-Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

"The trouble is that our dreams, like our memories, are not immune to revision."

-Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

If you liked the fiction plot in Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas , here is a list of 21 books like this:

Cover of Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan

1. Acts of Desperation

By: Megan Nolan

3.74

Format: 288 pages, None

In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic … read more

Similar categories in Megan Nolan's Acts of Desperation book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • romance
  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • adult
  • audiobook
"You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it's uniquely awful."

-Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

"I didn't want her near me, because she was the only one able to see me for what I was, but I couldn't lose her for the very same reason."

-Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

"You can't complain about feeling bad, about being depressed, if you aren't trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to care about yourself."

-Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

"I made mistakes like this all the time, seeking affirmation from the very worst people, so that what I must have been after deep down was confirmation of the fears instead of their dismissals"

-Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

Cover of Perfume & Pain by Anna  Dorn

2. Perfume & Pain

By: Anna Dorn

4.06

Format: 352 pages, Paperback

A controversial Los Angeles author attempts to revive her career and finally find true love in this… read more

Similar categories in Anna Dorn's Perfume & Pain book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • romance
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"I sit down wanting to write the great lesbian love story, but wacko bitches just keep coming out."

-Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

Cover of Rouge by Mona Awad

3. Rouge

By: Mona Awad

3.56

Format: 383 pages, Kindle Edition

From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lone… read more

Similar categories in Mona Awad's Rouge book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"If I had beauty, I decided then, I would never throw it away. I would never give it up."

-Mona Awad, Rouge

"I mean, we all have our dark days. Very dark days, sometimes. When our demons come out to play. No one lives entirely in the light, right?"

-Mona Awad, Rouge

"That I can’t protect you from my terrible places that I still go, can’t help but go because no one protected me, no one saved me, no one ever held out their hand and walked me away. But I’m trying to…"

-Mona Awad, Rouge

Cover of My Husband by Maud Ventura

4. My Husband

By: Maud Ventura

3.68

Format: 272 pages, Hardcover

In this suspenseful and darkly funny debut novel, a sophisticated French woman spends her life obse… read more

Similar categories in Maud Ventura's My Husband book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • romance
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"When it comes to love, I’ve learned nothing: I love too intensely and I’m consumed by my own love (analysis, jealousy, doubt)—so much that when I’m in love, I always end up slightly extinguished and …"

-Maud Ventura, My Husband

Cover of Penance by Eliza  Clark

5. Penance

By: Eliza Clark

3.90

Format: 336 pages, ebook

Do you know what happened already? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did you li… read more

Similar categories in Eliza Clark's Penance book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"Do you know what happened to her already? Did you catch it in the papers? Are you local? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did some website the trawls local news for the worst details…"

-Eliza Clark, Penance

Cover of Worry by Alexandra  Tanner

6. Worry

By: Alexandra Tanner

3.36

Format: 304 pages, Hardcover

Frances Ha meets No One Is Talking About This in a debut that follows two twenty-something siblings… read more

Similar categories in Alexandra Tanner's Worry book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • adult
  • audiobook
Cover of The Guest by Emma Cline

7. The Guest

By: Emma Cline

3.29

Format: 304 pages, Hardcover

A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestsel… read more

Similar categories in Emma Cline's The Guest book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • adult
  • audiobook
"Younger men had to make everything mean something, had to turn every choice and preference into a referendum on their personality."

-Emma Cline, The Guest

"He assumed her attention when he spoke. He had his insecurities, his anxieties. But underlying it all was the certainty that the world would be generous in its orientation toward him."

-Emma Cline, The Guest

"All the women in the show hated each other, hated each other so much, just so they could avoid hating their husbands. Only their little dogs, blinking from their laps, seemed real: they were the wome…"

-Emma Cline, The Guest

Cover of Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

8. Blue Sisters

By: Coco Mellors

4.21

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death… read more

Similar categories in Coco Mellors's Blue Sisters book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used a…"

-Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

Cover of The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

9. The Rachel Incident

By: Caroline O'Donoghue

4.09

Format: 304 pages, Hardcover

A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately tr… read more

Similar categories in Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • romance
  • literary fiction
  • coming of age
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously."

-Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

"He was a doctor and I was supposed to take what he said seriously; but he was a dentist and my dad so I didn’t."

-Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

"It's not that we weren't capable of warmth as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged."

-Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

"I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along."

-Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

Cover of Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

10. Thirst for Salt

By: Madelaine Lucas

3.84

Format: 272 pages, Paperback

A Bustle, LitHub, Debutiful, and NYLON Most Anticipated Book of 2023 A Goodreads Buzziest Book of t… read more

Similar categories in Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • romance
  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • coming of age
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • australia
  • novels
  • adult
  • audiobook
"As if it were possible to circumnavigate memory."

-Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

"I like you as you are, he said. Even if you're going to wear me out."

-Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

"As lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past."

-Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

"The trouble is that our dreams, like our memories, are not immune to revision."

-Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

Cover of Death Valley by Melissa Broder

11. Death Valley

By: Melissa Broder

3.49

Format: 240 pages, Hardcover

A woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has… read more

Similar categories in Melissa Broder's Death Valley book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • adult
  • audiobook
"My body is the real problem here. If I could be bodiless - or at least, senseless - I’d be better off."

-Melissa Broder, Death Valley

"This is the problem with human relationships: you come to a person with one feeling and they’re having another."

-Melissa Broder, Death Valley

"I am going to die out here. I might. I could. Die. All this time I should have been practising for dying. What was I doing instead? Reading reviews for sweatpants."

-Melissa Broder, Death Valley

"Stop placing so much value on the known, I tell myself. Fake like this is the hero’s journey. It’s good to get lost. Good for the soul. But how lost is the good amount of lost? If I die here, is that…"

-Melissa Broder, Death Valley

Cover of Brutes by Dizz Tate

12. Brutes

By: Dizz Tate

3.18

Format: 304 pages, Hardcover

The Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project in this wildly original debut—a coming-of-age story a… read more

Similar categories in Dizz Tate's Brutes book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • literary fiction
  • coming of age
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"to be loved, was just to be watched"

-Dizz Tate, Brutes

"We feel chased. It doesn't matter if it's only by our own shadows."

-Dizz Tate, Brutes

"and now I think that to humiliate a woman is the only way some men know how to love one."

-Dizz Tate, Brutes

"To be loved was just to be watched, or in my case, to imagine you are loved is to imagine you are watched all the time."

-Dizz Tate, Brutes

Cover of Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna

13. Evenings and Weekends

By: Oisín McKenna

3.96

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast … read more

Similar categories in Oisín McKenna's Evenings and Weekends book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • adult
  • audiobook
Cover of Piglet by Lottie Hazell

14. Piglet

By: Lottie Hazell

3.47

Format: 320 pages, Hardcover

An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it a… read more

Similar categories in Lottie Hazell's Piglet book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • adult
  • audiobook
"She picked up salted butter, thick Greek yoghurt, and cream. The menu was not modest. Her basket was already heavy with Charlotte potatoes, fresh herbs, and a Duchy chicken. It was too hot for a roas…"

-Lottie Hazell, Piglet

"She picked up salted butter, thick Greek yoghurt, and cream. The menu was not modest. Her basket was already heavy with Charlotte potatoes, fresh herbs, and a Duchy chicken. It was too hot for a roas…"

-Lottie Hazell, Piglet

"She opened the capers, green and freckled as amphibians, and with a teaspoon eased them from their brine. The olives were next, and she pushed pits from the aubergine-dark fruits, dropping their fles…"

-Lottie Hazell, Piglet

"On the platter before her there was a bowl of beef bourguignon, the sauce dark with merlot; the corner of dauphinoise potatoes, gruyère-crusted top browned, bubbled with heat; there was a small plate…"

-Lottie Hazell, Piglet

Cover of My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin

15. My Last Innocent Year

By: Daisy Alpert Florin

3.75

Format: 304 pages, Hardcover

An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one wo… read more

Similar categories in Daisy Alpert Florin's My Last Innocent Year book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • coming of age
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • adult
  • audiobook
Cover of Talking at Night by Claire Daverley

16. Talking at Night

By: Claire Daverley

3.96

Format: 400 pages, Hardcover

Will and Rosie meet as teenagers. They’re opposites in every way. She overthinks everything; he … read more

Similar categories in Claire Daverley's Talking at Night book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • romance
  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
Cover of Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

17. Big Swiss

By: Jen Beagin

3.68

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is … read more

Similar categories in Jen Beagin's Big Swiss book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • romance
  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"¿Habla más de un idioma?"

-Jen Beagin, Big Swiss

"You bullied other bullies,"

-Jen Beagin, Big Swiss

"she’d always been less of a shit-talker and more of a shit-thinker"

-Jen Beagin, Big Swiss

"At least I know where the hell I am and what’s happening. Which way is north?"

-Jen Beagin, Big Swiss

Cover of Green Dot by Madeleine Gray

18. Green Dot

By: Madeleine Gray

3.71

Format: 320 pages, Hardcover

An irresistible and messy love story about the terrible allure of wanting something that promises n… read more

Similar categories in Madeleine Gray's Green Dot book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • romance
  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • australia
  • adult
  • audiobook
Cover of Fruit of the Dead by Rachel  Lyon

19. Fruit of the Dead

By: Rachel Lyon

3.54

Format: 320 pages, Hardcover

An electric contemporary reimagining of the myth of Persephone and Demeter set over the course of o… read more

Similar categories in Rachel Lyon's Fruit of the Dead book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
Cover of Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter

20. Ripe

By: Sarah Rose Etter

3.63

Format: 288 pages, Hardcover

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, Cassie finds herself trapped in a … read more

Similar categories in Sarah Rose Etter's Ripe book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"The open office floor plan is a form of strangulation."

-Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

"Maybe there must always be two of us—our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is."

-Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

"When you're young, every part of life seems big and monumental. Once older you can see it for what it is: smaller pieces of a larger game you have no choice but to play."

-Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

"If the brain is elastic and memory is faulty, maybe all of these stories are wrong. Maybe it happened a different way altogether. Maybe I was happy and I just forget that now."

-Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

Cover of Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg

21. Housemates

By: Emma Copley Eisenberg

3.66

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

Two young housemates embark on a road trip to discover themselves in a fractured America in this sp… read more

Similar categories in Emma Copley Eisenberg's Housemates book and Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
"Teaching? When it’s good? A marvel. A fucking miracle. They live, and then they turn to you to tell you about it."

-Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates

21 Best contemporary books like Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

Transform Your Habits

Acts of Desperation

Megan Nolan

3.74

Transform Your Habits

Perfume & Pain

Anna Dorn

4.06

Transform Your Habits

Rouge

Mona Awad

3.56

Transform Your Habits

My Husband

Maud Ventura

3.68

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21 best-selling fiction books like Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Transform Your Habits

Perfume & Pain

Anna Dorn

4.06

Transform Your Habits

All Fours

Miranda July

3.81

Transform Your Habits

Exhibit

R.O. Kwon

3.24

Transform Your Habits

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Rufi Thorpe

3.97

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