Luster: A Novel

Raven Leilani

Aug 2020 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

WINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The New York Times Book Review, O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Shondaland, Boston Globe, and many more!

"So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven Leilani’s first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill." —Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Book Review

No one wants what no one wants.
And how do we even know what we want? How do we know we’re ready to take it?

Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage—with rules.

As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren’t hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric’s home—though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows.

Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani’s Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life—her hunger, her anger—in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

“An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that’s blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy.” —Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine

Ratings and reviews

This book is powerful. It's painful, but beautiful. The writing is sharp and witty, and the story is both almost absurdly foreign yet somehow inherently relatable. The protagonist has all the nihilism and cavalier apathy of Holden Caulfield a la Catcher in the Rye, but with an added layers of justified hopelessness in the face of race, gender, and financial inequality. Yet the book is politically poignant without being heavy handed. It is blunt and honest, in spite of (or probably because of) the story's long, isolating, dialogueless silences. For anyone who has ever felt the oppressive quiet of their own frustration, embarrassment, desperation, resentment, and self-loathing form a knot in their chest, it is like reading an autobiography. I felt like I could not breathe the entire time.

1w1..!?.

About the author

Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern,
Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from
NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Luster is her first novel.