Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk follows a vampire “Maria” as she escapes from her captors to find a place to fit in without suspicion. She ends up in Buenos Aires where she continues to feed to satisfy her thirst for blood. Present day Buenos Aires a young mother is struggling with her mother’s demise from a rare disease that is incurable. As she watches her mother heath quickly worsen, her mother gives her an envelope with a picture of a woman, two keys, and a deed to a crypt. She must unravel the mystery of these clues. “Maria” soon gets woken and befriended by Alma who helps her survive in this modern world. This is a quick read and a fan for anyone who loves a good vampire story. Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.

the cover is fantastic. this was everything i could have dreamed of and more and could not put it down from the second i picked it up. just wowww

Thirst was well written, though not particularly my cup of tea as it rather feels like a summary than delving deep into the story. I identified more with Alma’s point of view throughout the story and enjoyed her insights on life and death and peoples unwilling fascination with it. I was put off a bit by the way white or pale skin was referenced by the woman who goes by María, it felt pointed, especially in a story taking place in a country that has many people of a darker complexion.

Um...did I already read my favorite book of 2024?! I’m not sure how anything will best this absolutely stunning, lush, affecting gothic story split between two narrators—a centuries-old female vampire navigating Buenos Aires through its 1800s yellow fever epidemics, and a woman in present day Buenos Aires grappling with her mother’s terminal illness. It mixes classic Anne Rice vibes with issues of death, grief, sex, yearning, consent, and the strange, dark places where they all intertwine. This is one of the rare arcs that I know I'll purchase as a hard copy on release day. Gratitude to NetGalley and Dutton for this arc in exchange for an honest review.

This was the vampire book of my dreams. A queer, gothic nightmare full of grief and rage I couldn’t put down.

Thank you to the publisher and net galley for the ARC of this book. all opinions are my own.
I absolutely loved this! It was fantastic and I can not wait to see what's next! The character development, plot, and story were so well developed. I loved it.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

As a lover of vampire myth and gothic horror, this translated short book had me wishing for more.

To me this story felt like our FMC was slightly hinted to be one of Dracula's brides that was sacrificed by their village and delivered by her own mother. Yuszczuk has written a beautiful tale of not only survival, but feminine rage. A story also very much like Frankenstein, but a feminine monster perspective.

Also a female bisexual or pansexual vampire (cause who would stay straight for eternity if you're immortal) was very well represented in my opinion as their vampiric, animalistic, nature needing their never ending thirst to be satisfied and never cared whether the blood came from women or men. This being a more serious story as well it would have felt weird trying to add any humor or romantic banter between partners and adds in how to truly see how lonely vampirism can be as losing most of your humanity while immortal is inevitable.

I related a lot to the other half of this story as told from a human woman in this century having to experience grief for seeing a mother slowly decaying of a disease and you slowly losing your humanity in the process.

I was only really disappointed in the ending of how easy it felt for our human FMC to leave her child, when grieving her own mother and didn't think of how her own child would feel losing his mother.

DNF @ 50%

Lauded as a queer vampire sorry, I quickly downloaded it because it has all of the elements of a great story.

Unfortunately, from what I’ve read, there’s only one queer scene and not much else.

Wanted to like this one, but quickly lost interest.

<i>Thank you to Netgalley and Dutton Books for this eARC</i>

This was fantastic. I confess, I wasn't sure what to expect going in. Based on page count, it seemed like it should have felt shorter than it did, but this is a full, rich story of two characters, where their lives existed apart, and there they intersected.

This is probably the most 'literary fiction' title I've read in quite some time. It's ostensibly a genre book, given the vampire, but it's language, it's flow, the contrast between the rather straight forward part one (the vampire's tale in the past) and the sort of purposeful meandering of part two (Alma's tale in the present)...I don't know how properly to explain my thinking on this.

I wanted more of the two of them together. I'm sure it was never going to happen, that's not the type of story the author was writing, but that's fine. This was just great.

4.5 stars.

Translated fiction + vampires = yes, please! And as an added bonus, it's Gothic style horror. Think Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley.

This reads really fast. Told from dual viewpoints, the story starts off with the female vampire somewhere in Europe (maybe Germany, as she leaves from Bremen) at the end of an era. She ends up fleeing to Buenos Aires, where she hopes to go unnoticed. The second half of the story is told from the viewpoint of an unhappy woman who is struggling with grief and other problems.

I'm not really selling this. It's hard to explain. You should just read it. I would recommend it for fans of Gothic horror and translated fiction. But also for anyone that wants to try something dark.

Part one of "Thirst" tells the story of a young girl, sold to a monster and eventually turned into one herself. As I read through, I was reminded of everything I loved about Anne Rice's "Interview With A Vampire". Though "Thirst" lacks the camp and humor that make Louis and Lestat so charming and fun, it has something the boys could never give their reader: Feminine Rage. As the young vampire grows into her darkness and moves through her world with less and less care for the world around her, I found myself fully supporting her villainy. She is everything I've ever wanted in a vampire, which is why I was so disappointed when her story came to a screeching halt in the part two.
Nearly a century apart from the end of part one, part two tells the story of a woman losing her mother to a long and painful illness. It's a deep exploration on grief, loneliness, and the limits we all have for empathy. It's a wonderfully crafted, emotional story, but I had a difficult time seeing why the two were being told together. They have similar themes of loneliness and grief, but they're told by two very detached perspectives, making it hard to see them truly aligning in the way that they did.
This prose of this book is beautiful. Yuszczuk does a wonderful job at making the city setting come to life, and the way she writes her character's train of thought really puts you in their head. I just wish there had been more vampire in the vampire book.

Wow! All the comparisons to Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson were accurate, but Marina Yuszczuk has earned her own place among these gothic queens. I was swept away by this novel. The phrase "lovely but obscene" is the only phrase I can think of to describe it. Simple yet complex, deep yet also plain- it's one of those books that is going to haunt me for years to come.

A female vampire escapes from Europe and arrives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She describes her fight to survive, and as she watches the city change over the centuries, she decides to imprison herself in a deserted mausoleum in an old but famous cemetery. In the present time, a woman who works for a publishing house is trying to deal with her mother's terminal illness. After her mother gives her the deed to a mausoleum and a key, the woman finds herself inexplicably returning to the cemetery again and again. As they face fear, loneliness, and longing, the two women are drawn to each other.
I am not a huge horror fan and this is not something that I would normally pick up, but once I started reading Thirst, it was hard to put down. Set in two different timelines, it's a vampire story combined with feminist themes. The author is one of the new voices in Latinx literature. More sensitive readers should be aware that there are some erotic scenes.

Thirst is told from two perspectives, two unknown women who have very different relationships with death. The first, an ancient vampire who is death incarnate. The second, a human woman who is watching death slowly take her mother, illness eating the mother that she knew from the inside out. The theme of death as written by Marina Yuszczuk is reverent bordering on biblical.

As we learn about the ancient woman vampire, we see how her Creator bled the humanity out of her. How as she lost her humanity, she completely turned herself over to her animal instincts. In a way her insatiable thirst is a way for her to exert control over her immediate environment, control becomes both the driver of her actions and also her absolution. She becomes a death dealer, holding the balance of life and death between her teeth.

"There, as I undressed... I realized I had begun to resemble my Creator, and that the bitterness which had grown in me over centuries could only be soothed by more crimes, which would accumulate around me like half-forgotten statues."


To me, Thirst was what Frankenstein would have been if it had been written from the POV of the monster (creation) instead of Creator. "I was dragged into this story; my only freedom is to create."

One thing that I loved about Yuszczuk's writing was the setting of the novel. We get to see the evolution of Buenos Aires starting in the 19th C all the way to present day. Despite the centuries, Yuszczuk's Buenos Aires is alluring with sprawling cemeteries growing in the middle of the city. The gothic nature of the novel was originally what pulled me in. But I did have a hard time with Yuszczuk's writing style which I felt was very linear going from scene to scene in an almost monotonous order. "I did this" "then we talked" "I explained" "and then I walked to." This made the story feel a bit sterile at times, too much tell and not enough show, which I was disappointed by. I wanted to dive deeper into the psyche of the characters.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Wow, so I requested this anticipating some sort of sapphic vampire romance, and while that was ultimately there, this was not a romance novel and what absolutely blindsided me with this book was how clearly and accurately the author writes about grief and the slow death of a loved on in the last half (the modern day story).

All hopes of a sapphic romance were forgotten and I found myself bawling my eyes out because the author captured the complexities, helplessness, and oddness of grief so well. It is something you can only describe from experience, and even if we all will experience this feeling it is never any less shocking.

At first the two stories did not mesh well for me and I had trouble imagining how they would come together, but by the end it made perfect sense- of course Alma becomes enthralled with this ancient vampire as she deals with the slow loss of her mother because the lines of life, death, and reality blur completely in the face of overwhelming grief! This was the perfect opportunity for her world to shift in the way that it did and it just really worked for me by the end.

That being said, I did like the second half much more than the first, as I found it hard to relate to the characters in general aside from the grieving aspect. Overall an interesting read!

I feel almost let-down by this book -- the premise sounded intriguing and I was very excited to start reading, but after a thoroughly interesting beginning, the plot lost me somewhere in the middle. The vampire character's backstory was so detailed and I loved learning more about her, but the rest of the narrative didn't really resonate with me. I will say that since this is a translated novel, I'm sure some things got lost in said translations, but everything that made its way onto the pages fell flat for me. Despite that, this author has fantastic prose, and their vivid imagery really helped me get through the whole book.

Thank you to PENGUIN GROUP Dutton and netgalley for a digital arc in exchange for an honest review.

Thirst, by Marina Yuszczuk, is a haunting novel following the life of a vampire and intertwining it with a grief-stricken modern woman, spanning from centuries ago up until modern day.

There's a lot that I enjoyed about Thirst; I loved the backstory of our vampire. It was rich and detailed and I thought Yuszczuk did a fabulous job putting the readers in her mind. There was never a moment where I felt like she was excusing the behavior and murders, but allowing the reader to see what she saw, why she made the choices she did. I also thought, in the second act, her descriptions of grief were poignant and realistic. There was an emptiness, a numbness that comes with the type of grief our second main character was dealing with and it read on every line of the page. It's a very character driven novel; personally I love introspection and character studies but if someone was more of a plot-heavy person, this would not be their jam.

Unfortunately, Thirst never fully came together the way I wanted it to. While the first half was rich and detailed, the second was sparse, but when our characters intertwined, it felt like it was missing something. Given this is a translated version, I suspect we lost some of the poetry in the prose and potentially some of the fluidity when combining these worlds.

It also, I felt, ended very quickly. There wasn't as much build up as I expected and as I wanted. I was itching for More and it never quite took me there.

It's more of a 3.5 for me—the details and the first half really set a great ground work but I just couldn't get past the abrupt ending.

Realistically it's a 2.5 star read. This book is hard for me to define exactly. I really enjoyed the beginning, it lost me a bit in the middle, and it came around to a (mostly) okay conclusion at the end. I do think this book has its merits (particularly the part of the story that focuses on the vampire MC) but there were just clear disconnects here for me. And while the ending was okay, it comes at you quickly. I might come back to amend this after more reflection but this was just really middle of the road for me.

[My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.]

Darkly lyrical and dreamlike, this feminist Gothic vampire tale examines the lives (un-lives?) of two women trapped in circumstances they never chose, struggling to sustain themselves through fragile relationships and disappointments. One, sold by her family as a consort/menu item for the local undead lord, finds herself abandoned and adrift through Europe and into 19th century South America. The other, a single mother in modern Buenos Aires, is sinking under the weight of her own mother's terminal illness and a difficult connection with her small son.

The first half of this tightly plotted narrative is a blood-tinged historical, with many classic vampire tropes put to good use. The second half -- linked by a somewhat artificial device -- is a family drama sliding toward tragedy. When the two narratives mesh, a third option for both women emerges -- something neither is entirely prepared for.

This is Marina Yuszczuk's first novel to be translated into English. I'm left wondering what other shadowed gems we've been missing, and how quickly the problem will be corrected. Highly recommended for vampire fans in search of more substance, dark feminist fiction enthusiasts, and anyone seeking a thoughtful approach to undeath.

Was really promising for the first 75%, then seemed like the author didn’t know where to go with it or how to end it, so just ended it abruptly.