Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an e-arc for review.
This is a beautifully written and translated book. I was so impressed with how the flow of the writing was kept even in translation. It was clearly well researched, as there were lots of real world connections made throughout. This really leaves you feeling intrigued to find out more about the real world to see what was used in the book and what was made up. An example of this was the invention of fingerprinting to find perpetrators of crime. I enjoyed the single point of view, stream of consciousness style... despite this not always working for me. There was enough change in "direction" to keep me interested. This single point of view also encouraged me to think about how the main character was appearing to others throughout. The title and the exploration of the concept of thirst in many forms was such an interesting part of the book too. Vampire stories often end with the vampire losing all humanity... this was not the case here, as with the recollection of the main characters mother and child and the very human way they looked back over their life and vampirism and still made decisions based on human emotion and thought processes. This was a well written, well translated, vampire book that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys books that make you curious to know more and that love a good thought experiment. My rating is 4.5 stars.

Loved the prose and the story, particularly how it pertained to infection and the vampire being able to sneak under the radar during the yellow fever outbreak, although I wish this part had been longer

As queer vampire fiction I wanted to love this so badly but I found the whole thing disjointed and didn't really find the link between the two main characters to be strong enough to hold up a plot where nothing much is happening for 50%.

An interesting concept for sure but the juxtaposition between the vampire half of the book and the human half felt so stark but not related. Had it been an obvious death vs life I would've understood more but it felt more like death vs another death.

The ending left me feeling unsatisfied and I didn't understand why this woman who had spent the whole book talking about her son would willing leave to sit it a tomb with a vampire for eternity?

Overall I just feel a bit disappointed because I expected so much from this. It was an easy read and I enjoyed the vampire sections a lot!

Thanks to netgalley!

I absolutely loved the historical timeline of this book. However, I felt it lacked when we came to the present day and the story felt rushed.

A productive tool for critiquing aspects of human existence from capitalist institutions to notions of cultural contamination, the vampire’s frequently implicated in a broader struggle between good and evil: either in wider society, as in Stoker’s Dracula; or as internal conflict, as in Angel and Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Marina Yuszczuk’s equally intent on exploiting the vampire’s symbolic potential but not in reinforcing traditional moral binaries. Despite the gothic trappings, Yuszczuk’s representation of the vampiric harks back to the worldview of the nineteenth-century Decadent movement. Yusczuk’s far more interested in the vampire as a vehicle for reflections on mortality, bodily decay, instinct versus repression. It’s tempting to interpret Yusczuk’s piece as a response to Covid but it was actually written between 2017 and 2019, when Yuszczuk was caught up in the aftermath of witnessing her mother’s protracted illness and subsequent death. For Yuszczuk, horror fiction became a means of saying the unsayable, of processing immense loss.

Yuszczuk’s carefully-crafted piece opens with an oblique assessment of cultural attitudes towards mourning, constructed via an encounter with Buenos Aires’s famous La Recoleta Cemetery. She then moves back in time to the nineteenth-century, experienced from the perspective of an unnamed vampire. A young girl from a remote European village, she was handed over to a Dracula-like master by her mother, one of many such sacrifices to appease this dangerous creature. Post transformation, the vampire closely resembles one of Stoker’s nameless female vampires. Like them she lives with her “sister” vampires in the recesses of their master’s castle, locked into his patriarchal world, feeding only on prey he deigns to provide. But a chain of events leaves the vampire alone. Cut adrift, forced to fend for herself, circumstances lead her to developing city Buenos Aires. A place soon overwhelmed by an epidemic of deadly Yellow Fever. But as this ebbs, the city becomes embroiled in the pursuit of modernity and evolving scientific methods for tracking criminals leave the vampire vulnerable, out of step with this new world. So, she takes a drastic decision to escape this emerging reality.

The second half shifts the action to contemporary Buenos Aires and recently-divorced Alma. Alma’s recovering from major surgery, juggling a demanding job with caring for a small child, and grappling with her mother’s rapid decline. Her mother has an unspecified condition – most likely an aggressive form of Motor Neurone Disease – causing a creeping paralysis which will eventually kill her. Like the vampire, Alma’s alienated and increasingly isolated. But the vampire’s very existence was an embrace of pain and bodily degeneration; she inhabited a Buenos Aires where death was a public as much as a private spectacle. Alma’s situation is vastly different, demanding a retreat into silence and denial. In Alma’s Buenos Aires dying and grief are private affairs, she’s beset by unspoken expectations requiring her to downplay her emotions. There’s no socially-sanctioned outlet for Alma’s anguish, illness and death are sanitised, hidden away behind closed doors. Even the medical professionals overseeing her mother’s case refuse to be direct, instead they trade in infantilising euphemisms. Moreover, Argentina’s pervasive Catholicism robs Alma’s mother of bodily autonomy, closing off any possibility of a dignified death. Yuszcuzk’s comparison between Alma’s era and the vampire’s heyday highlights the continued precarity of existence, a contemporary world that’s as brutal as the past, it’s just that that brutality’s taken on new guises.

As Alma’s story unfolds, multiple points of overlap between the vampire’s earlier environment and Alma’s emerge. There’re striking similarities between nineteenth-century necropolitics and those of present-day Buenos Aires, both rife with social inequality, spaces in which some lives have far more value than others. In the vampire’s era, women outside without men were automatically suspect; in Alma’s city a woman living alone, or even entering a bar without a man in tow, is viewed as vulnerable or strange. When Alma and the vampire eventually meet, rather than the vampire reinforcing Alma’s fears she offers an unexpected escape route. Their relationship radically reframes Alma’s ideas about the maternal. For Alma motherhood, both mothering and being mothered, is fraught with anxiety over potential loss and abandonment. But, the growing bond between the vampire and Alma opens up fresh possibilities, a possible resolution to their respective existential predicaments. A means of quenching their overwhelming thirst for lasting connection and intimacy. An intriguing, provocative story; it doesn’t always come together but when it does – as in the sections featuring Alma and her mother – it’s intensely powerful.

Marina Yuszczuk's Thirst, translated by Heather Clearly, just didn't work for me at all. I can see that those who read it in the original Spanish found the language much more interesting, so I'll give Yuszczuk a pass on the dull prose, but the structure is such a mess. The central idea is actually captivating: a woman living in Buenos Aires and dealing with the slow death of her mother from what sounds like motor neurone disease encounters a mysterious tomb in the local graveyard. When she uses a key that has been passed down through her mother's family for generations to open it, she unleashes a monstrous woman - the same monstrous woman who appears in an ancient photograph she also found among her mother's things. Unfortunately, we don't get there until halfway through the novel, and I could happily have dispensed with the first half, which is an intensely cliched, uber-traditional recounting of the life of a female vampire who was first turned centuries ago. She's portrayed as the most basic and selfish of killers, so there really isn't much to go on in terms of character complexity. The second half introduces some more interesting threads, but it's incredibly slow - if we'd started the novel at this pace, I think it would have worked, but I was already losing patience by the 50% mark. Then, the ending makes our more sympathetic modern protagonist totally unsympathetic as well by rushing her into a decision that makes no sense at all. I think there's meant to be something here about queer female lust, but it just doesn't ever take off. 2.5 stars.

Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an early review copy via NetGalley! The novel has been translated into English by Heather Cleary.

Thirst is set across two different time periods. A couple of hundred years in the past, a vampire arrives in Buenos Aires after fleeing Europe. In the modern day, a woman is struggling to manage her relationships with her dying mother and her young son.

I loved the idea of this book. One aspect that I really enjoyed was seeing the change in setting and how this affected vampirism. I don’t know much about the history of Buenos Aires, so I felt like I was experiencing it at the same time as the characters. The vampire also had to come to terms with the development of technology and policing, which really impacted her actions.

The author makes sure to clearly show the emotions of both of the main characters. I was especially interested in the portrayal of familial relationships: the good, the bad, and the complex. The depiction of the woman’s elderly mother at the end of her life hit me particularly hard based on my own experiences.

I also liked that the author was not afraid to portray “unlikeable” characters. In the first half of the book, she portrays vampirism with unflinching honesty, and nothing was sugar coated. As for the second half, it was a different tone from someone who doesn’t feel present for different reasons.

I read a lot of sapphic books, and I especially love vampire stories, so I thought this would be right up my alley. While this had a lot of potential, ultimately it fell a little bit flat for me. There wasn’t really a driving force behind the plot, but that didn’t bother me too much because I found the book very quick to read. However, I just wanted more.

The synopsis made it seem as if there would be more interaction between the two women. I would have loved this book to be longer to just have more plot and character development. They barely interacted and I was expecting much more given the depth of focus we had around each character individually.

I won’t give any spoilers about the end, but while I could somewhat understand why it was happening, there were still some points that I expected to be addressed, if not resolved. The book ended so suddenly and I was left feeling underwhelmed, which was a shame.

If it sounds interesting, I would still recommend giving this book a go, especially since it was a short and fast read. However, I would be aware that there is little interaction between the two main female characters, and only at the end. If you prefer literary and introspective books, this might work for you, but if you want the focus to be on queer vampires and sapphic relationships, then this doesn’t quite fulfil that.

Thirst is a unique, philosophical and wonderfully gothic story. Yes, it’s about vampires. But it’s so much more than a vampire novel! It’s about travel and time passing, the progression of humanity and the pain of both immortality and mortality. It made me think about what it would truly mean to live such a long life.

Thirst begins, as all good stories do, in a cemetery. This instantly creates a gothic and macabre atmosphere. Throughout the book, there are similarly constant reminders about death. But this isn’t particularly dark or menacing because we are always surrounded by reminders of it. For a vampire who has lived so long, these are reminders of the past rather than a fate that must be met in the future.

I think that the book’s strongest quality was its writing. Yuszczuk has a wonderful writing style and I really hope more of her books become translated! She has a great way of creating a world for the reader. And whilst I didn’t love the romance (a bit too insta-love) I really enjoyed reading about such complex characters. Plus, lesbian vampire stories are the best. I love books like Carmilla and An Education in Malice and I also can’t wait until Bury our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V E Schwab is published. These queer, feminist vampire stories have a really interesting take on desire and want which makes them all the more interesting. Especially because historically women have been encouraged never to desire; whether it is for other people, money, power or acclaim. But when you’re a vampire, there is no choice but to give into different desires.

This book is perfect if you want a more literary (but still slightly spooky) book for Halloween!

This is a vampire story with atmospheric writing, echoes of Carmilla and a split narrative; one navigating heartache of her mothers illness in modern Buenos Aires and the other doused in bloodthirsty eras past. Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary, is releasing tomorrow in the UK—perfect timing for Halloween !

‘𝑰 𝒎𝒆𝒍𝒕 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒎𝒍𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝒔𝒉𝒂𝒅𝒐𝒘𝒔 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆𝒔, 𝒔𝒊𝒍𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒂𝒈𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒃𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒈𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅, 𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆𝒔 𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒈𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒃𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝒄𝒍𝒂𝒘𝒔 𝒐𝒓 𝒇𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒔.’

This story is short but somehow felt like a full length novel with each character’s points of view reading like two completely different books. The prose is lyrical and somehow works for both the fast paced first half and slow paced second.

The depictions of life for a blood lusting vampire in the 19th century delivered a Carmilla flair that I was interested in right away. However, the lush atmosphere that was created during this was soon sterlised by the introduction of the modern day setting in the second part, sadly. That being said, i did enjoy the grief explored with the slow passing of the human character’s mother and think that the slowing of the pace here echoed that.

‘𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒑𝒆𝒏𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒄𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒆𝒔, 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆 𝒂𝒏 𝒐𝒚𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒐𝒄𝒆𝒂𝒏 𝒇𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒓, 𝒕𝒐 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒂𝒍 𝒊𝒕𝒔 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒎𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒘𝒉𝒐 𝒂𝒔𝒑𝒊𝒓𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒊𝒕𝒔 𝒆𝒎𝒃𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒆: 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒂 𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝒔𝒂𝒏𝒅; 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒂 𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒍.’

Overall i enjoyed this quick read (just wished there was more vampire moments in the second half !) and will be picking up the next release from Marina Yuszczuk.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Thirst, at times, feels like two books rolled into one—they do link together and act as two parts of a whole, but it feels quite jarring when switching from the first act to the second.
 
We begin with our unnamed vampire—her creation, early life, and how she passed the decades that spun onwards from that. Loss, survival, and learning to hide in plain sight. 
 
The first act was incredible, frankly, and I think that if the rest of the book had continued in that way or even remained in our unnamed vampires perspective, this book may have been a five-star read for me. It was brutal, heady, and yet also sexy, in the most macabre of ways. I also found its handling of religion fascinating.
 
The second act revolves around a woman in the present day who is losing her mother to a cruel disease whilst trying to juggle work and her young son. She is handed the keys to a tomb in the Recoleta cemetery, which have been passed down through her family, and she finds herself being repeatedly drawn to said tomb.
 
I think I struggled with the sudden change of pace. Again, the first part feels like a gory, hedonistic rollercoaster, which suddenly rolls to a stop and plunges us into a much slower-paced book. 
 
I also then found the ending to be incredibly abrupt. The book was dragging slightly, and then, when it was finally getting interesting, it suddenly ended in a way that left me scratching my head. I suppose that might have reflected how our modern-day woman was feeling about that period in her life—a slow existence that suddenly sped up—but it made for a disjointed reading experience. 
 
I do want to say that I loved the setting of this book. Bueno Aires feels like a living, breathing character in this book as the city moves through the decades and grows around the famous cemetery. 
 
This novel isn’t too long, so I do feel like it’s still worth checking out—the setting alone heightens the story, and the first act is a brilliant piece of vampiric literature. It’s just a shame that the second act drags it down somewhat. 
 
Thank you to the publishers, and Netgalley, for the copy to review.

People are calling this the "return of the gothic vampire novel" and I agree. Absolute vibes and a rich writing style, and a take on vampires that felt simultaneously fresh and classic.

The first half is set in 18th century Buenos Aires and we follow our unnamed vampire narrator as she quenches her thirst for blood and tries to deal with a changing world amid an epidemic and the modernisation of technology. We then follow a divorced mother in the modern day who is (failing at) deaing with her own mother's terminal illness and ends up meeting our vampire.

I especially liked the exploration and antithesis of a vampire dealing with immortality, and a terminally ill woman who wants to die but is forced to endure her body being kept alive by modern medicine.

The first half was definitely my favourite because I was SAT for the animalistic vampire drinking her way through Buenos Aires. The second half was definitely done very well but was very "standard literary" for a while and I really missed the supernatural elements. I think the ending left me a little bit unsatisfied as well.

A 2 generational lens into the life of a female vampire. Part 1 was absolutely fantastic, a first person lens inside the body, mind and emotions of the vampire. Part 2 was less great & the last page was unbelievable to me.

"Thirst" is a fantastic take on the vampire mythos. I confess that the first half felt a bit too rambling for my taste, as if we were following an aimless character, sitting back and watching time pass her by. However, the second half of the book was much more captivating, especially in its exploration of grief and death through the main character. The ending is both unusual and unexpected.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC of Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated from the Spanish (Argentina) by Heather Cleary. I was drawn to this book because of its promise of moody sapphic vibes, and in the first part it definitely delivered. One of the editorial reviews praises the author for taking vampires, ‘a trivialised monster’, and bringing them to life in her own way. I both agree and disagree. Vampires thanks to Stephanie Meyer have been subject to so many jokes and memes that I found it difficult to see the vampire as ominous. She slotted right into all the vampire clichés, driven only by her need to feed and have sex. I think there was much more that could have been done with her character.

The second half focuses on Alma, a human woman in modern day Buenos Aires who’s struggling with single motherhood and her own mother dying. Although we lose the moody gay vibes (temporarily), I did appreciate the mediation on grief and mental health.

The storylines don’t intersect as much as I’d hoped, and the ending completely blindsided me. Overall a mixed back, with the atmosphere and portrayal of grief making up for gaps elsewhere.

This was honestly such a unique take on a vampire story. I feel like we romanticised vampires to such a degree that they aren't really monstrous anymore. They are just love interests at this point, dark but never crossing certain lines.

Thirst wasn't afraid of crossing those lines. The vampire in this story is murderous and doesn't care who she hurts. She's cruel and senseless and... To me she felt more like personification of death.

For so many of the characters whose path she crosses she reflects their connection to death. For a doctor who couldn't help his patients she was a temptress, a lover and someone he tried to posses. For a priest who broke his vows she came quickly and violently with just emptiness beyond. For a woman buried alive she was the personification of being stuck in this half place between life and death. For a man who spent his life in service of the cemetery, she was a trusted friend who he longed for.

And for Alma death was always nearby, terrifying but at the same time so enticing. Death was someone she wanted to welcome, not tame or overcome.

It was surprisingly beautiful and enchanting story. And it was nothing like I expected. It is not your normal vampire story but it's still so worth delving into.

In the first half of this book we follow a nineteenth century vampire as she goes on a murderous rampage across Europe. She realises she should probably split before someone catches onto her and gets on a boat to Buenos Aires. Here she goes on another murderous rampage in the height of a yellow fever pandemic.

The second half is modern day Buenos Aires where a woman is struggling to cope with the later stages of her mother’s terminal illness. Her world is shattering. She encounters the vampire in the cemetery one day and this changes the course of things.

I will say that I expected a whole lot more queer vampires than I ended up getting. This is more of a study of these two characters independently and the connecting of the narratives was really clunky? I much preferred the first half and could’ve read a full book on her gruesome escapades.

A tale of two parts that didn’t quite weave together for me!

As a vampire lover I was extremely excited to read this and though I did struggle at some points to keep reading due to pacing and language, overall I did enjoy this book.

The first part was exceedingly atmospheric and blended literary fiction and vampiric fiction beautifully. But I was more engaged by the second part as it felt more relatable to me.

Both parts explored death and grief in a very interesting and unique way.

Though I did think the two women’s lives would intersect more, I did like the small similarities and overarching themes they both shared.

Thank you to Scribe and NetGallery for allowing me to read this book before publication.

the first half of this was incredible to me! maria had such an interesting life and i really enjoyed reading i think i would have preferred more of that over the second half.

part two was good, but after part 1 felt slightly disappointing. there’s a lot of focus on alma’s mothers illness, which i understand i did quite like, but i feel like it took away from some of the other plots. i particularly wish more time had been spent on her relationship with her son.

i also didn’t quite understand the ending. she talks about loving her son, yet is willing to leave him? for a woman she barely knows? it just felt strange to me.

Absolutely loved this - the perfect literary / historical blend.

This book is set up into two parts - the first part is the perspective of the vampire as we follow her through her life to the present day, from her time in Europe to arriving in Buenos Aires and her centuries there. This part falls into the historical fiction/horror category, and the writing is expressive and bold.
The second part follows another character in present-day Buenos Aires as she deals with being a parent and having her mother die of a terminal illness, and eventually unlocks the tomb of the vampire. This half is much more literary and the writing is a lot more meandering, and you really get a sense that this character's world is slowly unraveling.

I loved the parallels that were drawn between these two parts - the themes of dying, grief and experiencing change against your will. It was such an evocative read and I loved the sense of impending doom you got throughout the book.

100% recommend for anyone looking for vampire books... this is IT!!

Thank you Scribe & Netgalley for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Content warning: murder, death, terminal illness, death of a family member, violence, pandemic/plague

As a fan of vampiric novels, it feels strange to say that the vampire element was actually my least favourite part of this book, though I did appreciate some of the less traditional choices the author made with the vampire story arc. I considered DNFing it during the first half, but I’m glad I persisted because the second half resonated with me on a much deeper level.

Although I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I’d hoped, I appreciated its exploration of life, death, and illness. The thematic culmination tied everything together in the way I had been hoping for. That being said, I can imagine the ending being fairly divisive, so definitely keep that in mind!

It was certainly a slow read, but for those who appreciate slow-burn literary fiction with darker themes, I think this book could be for you.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-ARC. All opinions are my own.