Luster

By: Raven Leilani

Narrated by: Ariel Blake

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

Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize 2021

Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Debut of the Year

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021

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.

©2020 Raven Leilani (P)2021 Macmillan Publishers International Ltd

Critic reviews

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

"Remarkable, the most delicious novel I’ve read." (Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie)

"Ridiculously good.... I will follow this author anywhere she wants to take me." (Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties)

A great listen

The story was often confronting and the protagonist’s life choices questionable, but this is an entertaining book. It deals with big issues in an understated and insightful way. Raven Leilani’s writing is superlative. A writer to look out for. Credit is also due to Ariel Blake for an authentic and captivating performance that never intrudes on the story.