Luster

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About this listen

Razor sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut.

'A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It's brutal–and brilliant.' - Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth

'A book of pure fineness, exceptional.' – Diana Evans, Guardian

Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize
Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Debut of the Year
Longlisted for the Women's Prize For Fiction

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.

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

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award.

'A giddy joy, crafted with mischievous perfection.' – Mail on Sunday

African American

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Women's Fiction

World Literature

Marriage

Heartfelt

Mind-bending

African American Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction World Literature Marriage Heartfelt Mind-bending

Critic reviews

A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It's brutal—and brilliant. (Zadie Smith, author of Swing Time)

Raven Leilani is a writer of unusual daring, with a voice that is unique and fully formed. There is humor, intelligence, emotion, and power in her work. I cannot think of a writer better suited to capture our contemporary moment. (Katie Kitamura, author of A Separation)

Luster is entirely remarkable, and the most delicious novel I’ve read. I couldn’t get enough of Raven Leilani’s starkly accurate portrayal of the nuances of being a young woman today. (Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie)

A darkly funny, hilariously moving debut from a stunning new voice. Raven Leilani crafts a beautiful, bighearted story about intimacy and art that will astound and wound you. I couldn’t put this one down. (Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half)

Luster is ridiculously good: gorgeous, dark, and funny, with sentences that'll wreck you. I will follow this author anywhere she wants to take me. (Carmen Maria Machado author of In the Dream House)

The narrative voice of this startling novel is layered, complex, pitch-black comic, and deadly earnest, even ardent in its will to sift through the chaos and idiocy of our madhouse culture and find some glimpse of human reality. Raven Leilani has made a truly lustrous piece of art. (Mary Gaitskill, author of This Is Pleasure)

If you like Normal People, you’ll love Luster . . . a squirm inducing marvel

Raven Leilani’s style is a truly original mix of the new and the wise, of wit and despair. She has poignantly captured the obsession that drives, and often destroys, every true artist. I adored Luster for its honesty and weird beauty. (Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither)

A beguiling fever dream of a novel, shot through with wistfulness, humor, and a kind of breathless, furious verve. You’ll find it impossible to put down. (Ling Ma, author of Severance)

Hilarious, honest, bursting with desire and cutting insight, Luster is absolutely captivating. I didn’t so much read it, as gulp it down. There’s so much to learn here, so much to admire. Leilani is an irreverent, impeccable stylist—a voice we need right now. (Justin Torres, author of We the Animals)

A coming-of-age story that’s sure to keep you turning pages

Spinning fresh commentary on both race and class, tensions in the house rise as Raven Leilani propels her lost protagonist on a darkly funny journey of self-discovery.

Raw, racy, and utterly mesmerizing, Luster is among the most dazzling novels of the year, marking the arrival of a major new voice . . . Dreamlike, tender, and big-hearted, Luster is a must-read

This book is luminous, glorious. From the first sentence I knew there was word-magic here and that I would read any sentence Leilani cares to write. What a marvel. (Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under)

Most relevant

Hard to pin down, a very modernistic-feeling tale.

Edie. Office worker. Twenty-three. No qualms about sleeping with men, pandering to their whims, searching for something that clicks. With dreams of focusing on her art.

This is her story, a relatively brief account of the months after she meets a man twice her age, married but openly so. We see a very honest Edie describe and live through the early stages of getting to know Eric, before she unexpectedly becomes more entangled with his family.

Leilani gives us a slightly dark peek at the contemporary world of young women, single and unafraid, open to new experiences and searching for that direction that offers them future happiness. And an escape from boredom and mundanity.

The characters aren't wholly likeable, I found it difficult to watch Edie acquiescing to the demands of various men, not exactly submissively but not from a position of power either.

Such an unusual spin on the theme of affairs, of entanglements and wives and marriages. It's a story set in our time, of our time. Eric pales in comparison to his wife as a character of interest - how she interacts with Edie is much more interesting in my opinion.

This isn't a long book, it's a fairly slow story where a lot is thought and explored. It might make readers uncomfortable but it did feel like a hidden story from the world we inhabit that is probably going on under our noses. Is this really what life for the young is?

I don't know how I feel about that. Is it a freer life? A more joyless one?

It makes a wonderful audiobook, the intense closeness of some of the scenes narrated for us by Edie as we listen along, the first person immediacy only increasing some of the dark tension. It is an uncomplicated Audible choice, one with a straight structure that won't confuse.

This will repeat on you, Edie and her life, her choices, the strange situation she finds herself in. One for discussion and consideration.

With thanks to Nudge Books for providing a sample Audible copy.