Luster: Raven Leilani
By Raven Leilani

Winner of theand Dylan Thomas Prize 2021Longlisted for the Women's Prize For Fiction 2021 A book of pure fineness, exceptional.' - Diana Evans,and Guardian'A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It's brutal-and brilliant.' - Zadie SmithEdie 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,and Lusterand by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR:and Guardian,and New York Times,and New Yorker,and Boston Globe,and Literary Hub,and Vanity Fair,and Los Angeles Times,and Glamour,and Time,and Good Housekeeping,and InStyle, NPR,and O Magazine, Buzzfeed,and Electric Literature,and Town andamp; Country,and Wired,and New Statesman,and Vox,and Shelf Awareness,and i-D,and BookPageand and more.One of Barack Obama's Favourite Books of 2020