Thirst

By: Benjamin Warner

Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin

Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

On a searing summer Friday, Eddie Chapman has been stuck for hours in a traffic jam. 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 along the edge of a stream have been burnt, and the water in the streambed is gone. Something is very wrong.

When he arrives home, the power is out, and there is no running water. The pipes everywhere, it seems, have gone dry. Eddie and his wife, Laura, find themselves thrust together with their neighbors 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 neighbors suffer the effects of the heat, their thirst, and the terrifying realization 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, Ben Warner compels listeners to do the same. What might you do to survive?

©2016 Benjamin Warner (P)2016 Audible, Ltd

Critic reviews

"An emergency from its very first sentence, Thirst is a literary thriller that summons the survivalist terror of The Road and the beautiful, aching humanity of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and José Saramago. It’s also a tense, prescient journey into a collective environmental nightmare - one that’s not very hard to imagine actually happening. This book tapped into fears I didn’t know I had. Warner has given us a worthy, shocking, and poetic debut." (Patrick Somerville, author of This Bright River and The Cradle)
"Thirst mirrors the deep anxiety so many feel about modern life: that its complexity makes it fragile and that we're all living on the edge of disaster." (Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow and Epitaph)

Good performance but a frustrating story

The premise of the story is a refreshing change in the genre. However, the behavior and actions of the main characters are just not believable. {Spoiler alert}: In an end of the world scenario, the main characters would rather die of thirst than break into an abandoned house for water because that is against the law. That is a bit of an over-simplification of the story elements but is generally true. The characters drink distasteful things to prolong their lives and are smart enough to take water from their toilet tanks, but even as they are slowly dying, using the 40 gallons of water in their hot water tank never occurs to them? I just couldn't get past stuff like that. It reminded me of a horror movie when you are yelling at the screen for the main character to turn on the light or PICK UP THE GUN!