Luster
Longlisted for the Women's Prize For Fiction
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3.7 • 168 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It's brutal – and brilliant.' – Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud
Longlisted for the Women's Prize For Fiction
Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize
Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Debut of the Year
'The most delicious novel I’ve read' – Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie
Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office. Is sleeping with all the wrong men. And has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her, painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hook-up.
And then she meets Eric, a white middle-aged archivist with a suburban family. Including a wife who has sort-of-agreed to an open marriage, and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics as a young black woman wasn’t already hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s home and family.
Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Literary Hub, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Time, Good Housekeeping, InStyle, NPR, O Magazine, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, Town & Country, Wired, New Statesman, Vox, Shelf Awareness, i-D, BookPage and more.
One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of the Year
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Whew. There is a lot going on in Raven Leilani’s whip-smart debut, a novel that takes on issues of race, class, sex, art and identity and doesn’t back down from any of the complicated feelings stirred up. Aspiring artist Edie finds herself in a personal tailspin when she’s drawn into a middle-aged couple’s open marriage and their comfy suburban home. We follow the 23-year-old as she navigates her relationships with the increasingly unreliable Eric, his seemingly placid wife, Rebecca, and their adopted teenage daughter, Akila, who’s as confused as Edie is about how to be a Black woman in white-dominated spaces. Leilani structures the book around Edie’s interior monologue—and she does an amazing job of capturing her heroine’s emotional fearlessness, which intensifies as Edie pours the turmoil surrounding her into her art. Luster is a deeply erotic novel even when there’s no sex on the page. It’s the sort of book you’ll give to your friends so that you’ll have someone to talk about it with.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Leilani debuts with a moving examination of a young black woman's economic desperation and her relationship to violence. Edie is a 20-something low-level employee at a New York city publishing house. She paints on the side, but not often or well enough to comfortably call herself an artist, and she's infatuated with Eric Walker, a married white man twice her age she met online, with whom she explores his thirst for aggressive domination ("I think I'd like to hit you," he says; she lets him) and is caught breaking the rules of Eric's open marriage (no going to his house). After Edie loses her job, Eric's wife, Rebecca, invites her to stay with them in New Jersey. The arrangement functions partly to vex Eric and partly to support Akila, the Walkers' adopted black daughter. An inevitable betrayal cracks the household's veneer of civility, and suddenly Edie must make new arrangements. She does so in earnest, but not before a horrific scene in which Edie and Akila are victims of police brutality. Edie's ability to navigate the complicated relationships with the Walkers exhibits Leilani's mastery of nuance, and the narration is perceptive, funny, and emotionally charged. Edie's frank, self-possessed voice will keep a firm grip on readers all the way to the bitter end.
Customer Reviews
Lustre
This book got me hooked after page 1
It's exciting and is quite comical. Only downside is you get to chapter 2 and can't get to chapter 3 on the the books app in apple. So that was very disappointing! I want to read more!
Didn’t understand it whatsoever.
I really didn’t understand what was going on throughout the whole book. Sorry, but I wouldn’t recommend.
BORING !!!
I got to the second page & wanted to kms! What is it with black authors writing the same book a thousand times over! Black girl who can’t do her hair, body issues, work issues, socially awkward & falls in love with a white man! Queenie, The other black girl, one night with you! It’s all the same! Other things happen to black women in real life besides struggle & a natural hair journey smh action, comedy, fantasy, soft life anything? Also the style of writing is poo, I’m not sure what you was trying to achieve, but this was punishment! I didn’t see the comedy or darkness, it was just dull