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 SmithWinner of the Dylan Thomas Prize 2021Longlisted for the Women’s Prize For Fiction 2021 Edie is just trying to survive. ‘A book of pure fineness, exceptional.’ – Diana Evans, GuardianĪ 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.‘A book of pure fineness, exceptional.’ – Diana Evans, Guardian’A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now.

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. 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. Longlisted for the Women's Prize For FictionĮdie is just trying to survive. Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Debut of the Year It's brutal-and brilliant.' - Zadie Smith 'A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now.

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