“How strange, she thought…that at the same moment she was transformed, he was as well—only in a much more permanent and horrible way. I’m sorry, Andrew, so sorry it was all too late...”
The Long Thirst is the story of one woman’s journey across the arid plains of Northern India and the dry, flat expanses of her soul as she struggles to transport the body of her dead husband to a village that may not even exist and, ultimately, to find her redemption.
When Vanessa Holcomb learns of the brutal death of her husband, Andy, she is propelled on a quest to return his coffin-entombed, cryogenically frozen body to Gaberdai, the small village in India where she feels he left a piece of his soul. Once in India, she encounters Jabhir, the taxi driver, who vows to take her to the village but instead drops her and her now defrosting cargo at a remote crossroads with the promise of a bus to come. In an interweaving of time and space, place and dream, a macabre and often surreal pilgrimage unfolds. Vanessa drifts dangerously close to the line between sanity and the chaos beyond as she transports her profound burden across a barren and unforgiving landscape where characters materialize out of the heat waves like ghosts, and Andy, always present, inhabits the dark and vast sea of her dreams.
Eventually, fate deposits Vanessa and her now fetid load in a small, stark village, which she is not sure is the one she seeks. Here she meets up with the mysterious orphan boy, Jonji, who awaits the fulfillment of a long-ago promise; the older woman, Chacharabai, who lives for the return of her only son who died twenty-five years ago; and Sarosh, the boy becoming a man who lost all hope for his future when the tragic death of his family deposited him in this out-of-the-way corner. Together, the four will form a strange bond that may save them all.
On the vast, dry plains, Vanessa had hoped to reunite Andy with what he had lost. Instead, she finds herself in a village as barren as their lives had become. But as the clutter of the modern world drifts from her mind and the fated web of connections weaves into place, she begins to find something else, something on the edge of knowing. And as the rains come at last to the thirsty plain, so also comes a new chance for life.
The Long Thirst is a modern-day female Siddhartha story about life and death, redemption and renewal, one woman’s search for her place in it all, and the bond that can hold us all together.
Winner, The Zola Award, Jean M. Auel Mainstream Novel (PNWA Conference).