The gorgeous, poignant new novel about unexpected love within an arranged marriage in mid-century India, by the award-winning author of Brahma's Dream.
 
Thirst is about many forms of desire--and most particularly, at its heart, about love unexpectedly found and lost during a difficult time (WWII) and in an unlikely spot: within a hastily arranged union between two young people who begin their marriage as complete strangers. The lovers are Vasanti, an intelligent woman who has nonetheless grown up naive and protected; and Baba, the scion of a prominent Brahmin family who longs to study in London, thus escaping the family compound in Nagpur. The novel moves between the lushness of India and the sombre grayness of London during the Blitz, even as Ghatage brilliantly unwinds the story of two conflicted people who, slowly but surely, learn to tolerate, then like, then passionately love each other just as their worlds fall apart.

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“The plot of Thirst hurtles along with that breathless quality in books we find hard to put down. . . . Ghatage writes with emotional honesty and elegance. Thirst is a delicious pleasure to read.”
—Toronto Star

“Ghatage moves the narrative through time and space smoothly, employing suspense to keep the tale of Baba and Vas-anti entrancing. . . . Sensory detail is splendid. Ghatage contrasts the physical: the spicy heat of India and the bland cold of Britain.”
—The Vancouver Sun

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SHREE GHATAGE is the author of the short story collection Awake When All the World is Asleep, which won the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was shortlisted for several other awards, and the novel Brahma's Dream, a Kiriyama Notable Book. Ghatage and her family came to Canada in the early 1980s, spent several years in the Maritimes, and now live in Calgary, Alberta.

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