________________________ 'A terrifying thriller ... Visceral' - Entertainment Weekly 'An emergency from its very first sentence ... A literary thriller that summons the survivalist terror of The Road' - Patrick Somerville, author of This Bright River ________________________ WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF THE WATER RAN DRY? On a searing summer evening, Eddie Chapman has been stuck in a traffic jam for hours. There are accidents along the highway, but ambulances and police are conspicuously absent. When he decides to abandon his car and run home, he sees that the trees have been burned and the water in the stream bed is gone. Something is very wrong. When he arrives home, there is a power cut and no running water. The pipes everywhere, it seems, are dry. Eddie and his wife, Laura, find themselves thrust together with their neighbours while a sense of unease thickens in the stifling night air. Thirst takes place in the immediate aftermath of a mysterious disaster - the Chapmans and their community suffer the effects of the heat, their thirst and the terrifying realisation that no one is coming to help. As violence rips through the community, Eddie and Laura are forced to recall secrets from their past and question their present humanity. In crisp and convincing prose, Benjamin Warner compels readers to do the same. ________________________ 'A timely, necessary, character-driven meditation on morality, society, and responsibility. Thirst presses us, accuses and implicates us in the failures of its characters' - Chicago Review of Books Warner's devastating and breathtaking debut is a novel about water. But it's also about what it means to be in love, what it means to share - or to think you are sharing - your life with another person. This is a story about community (that ever slippery union) and, further still, about humanity ... Warner taps into a universal: Even at our lowest, our loneliest, and in our most desperate hour, we are still human, still connected ... Read this book. It will make you a better person