Luster

A book of pure fineness, exceptional.` – Diana Evans, Guardian`A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It`s brutal - and brilliant.` - Zadie SmithWinner of the Dylan Thomas Prize 2021Longlisted for the Women`s Prize For Fiction 2021Edie 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 2020