Synopsis

Her name is Alice. She's 27. They placed her in a clinic with the reassuring name of a Home, but she can't say how long she's been there. She desperately longs for Luca. Luca smells good, Luca holds her by the hips, Luca laughs. But her mother's icy eyes are the only ones she sees. Along with the inquisitive ones of her therapist, who never stops asking questions. Because diabetes, doctors repeat, isn't a disease, it's a condition. You have to learn to notice the symptoms, be ready to prick, load the little black pen of your blood sugar meter like a gun, and shoot. Accept it like you accept a blood bond. Alice doesn't know how it's possible, at her age, to get used to the idea of ​​not producing enough insulin, because first of all she has to deal with Luca's absence—Luca in the car, Luca who drove—to understand how to live with a lack that is, inevitably, an addiction. In a novel of stations that portrays the apathetic frenzy of a generation that has already locked away its dreams, Alice Torriani invents an alphabet to tell of loss and recovery. "The Other Thirst" is a story about ourselves, about burning love, and about all those demons of our time that stir within us, and that are sometimes more frightening than an illness.