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. 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.

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. It’s a social satire, with all its carefully detailed descriptions of.

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. Luster, the debut novel by Raven Leilani that is the Vox Book Club ’s February book pick, exists in several genres at once. 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. 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. It's brutal-and brilliant.' - Zadie Smith Edie is just trying to survive. Luster A Novel by Raven Leilani 22.99 USD Get for 14.

Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize 2021 Longlisted for the Women's Prize For Fiction 2021 'A book of pure fineness, exceptional.' - Diana Evans, Guardian 'A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. “and I feel it anew, this terrible disappointment in myself that I am happy to take out on him.

Luster by raven