Luster
Books | Fiction / Literary
3.5
(8.1K)
Raven Leilani
'A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It's brutal—and brilliant.' - Zadie SmithWinner of the Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Debut of the YearLonglisted for the Women's Prize For FictionEdie 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, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.‘A book of pure fineness, exceptional.’ – Diana Evans, GuardianA 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 the Year.
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More Details:
Author
Raven Leilani
Pages
240
Publisher
Pan Macmillan
Published Date
2020-10-01
ISBN
1529036011 9781529036015
Community ReviewsSee all
"Why am I sobbing right now?! While much of this book is devastating, the tone isn’t really sad. It’s more depressed or even despondent. It’s just so real. The narrator is so frank and matter of fact about everything that happens to her from her IBS to playing video games to no longer enjoying sex with a man who turns out just to be an old, sad man.<br/><br/>I cry easily, but the tone of this story made it so that even when incredibly uncomfortable things were happening or terrible memories were being recalled, I didn’t feel like crying. However, by the end of the book, after having chills 97% of the time while listening, I couldn’t help but break down because of the pain of reality so accurately depicted here.<br/><br/>You have to read this for yourself. I recommend listening on audio because the narrator, Ariel Blake, sets the mood perfectly. While my personal story is mostly dissimilar to the main character’s on a macro level, I still felt this story in my bones because of the feeling. This book should be used to study ‘atmospheric’ in literature.<br/><br/>TW for statutory rape, suicide, police violence, suicidal ideation, addiction, child loss"
"I thought this book was awful and honestly made no sense. "
C F
C F
"@sarahlong21 it’s a good quick read! I just finished daughter of no worlds, it’s a good read if you like fantasy. "
S R
Sal Rich
"Chile, Edie's life was a hot mess. I think I was overwhelmed by how much of a train wreck she was. I'm just a few years older than Edie's character so I can relate to her character so much and that was nice for a change. I'm tired of reading books of people in their 30s/40s or teenagers, I hardly come across books where the main character is 20-29 years old. With that being said, the amount of reckless decisions she made was just absurd. So many times I had a "oh no baby what are you doing?!" moment. In some moments, I did relate to her. The moments that displayed her deteriorating mental health and struggle to get the hang of this adulting thing were definitely relatable. <br/><br/>I struggled to determine how I felt about this book. The writing style made me feel like I was in a very long dream, very much a stream of consciousness type of flow. I enjoyed that. On the other side of that, there were so many details in the story that were unnecessary. I struggled mostly with the plot. You mean to tell me this woman dates (?) this older married man, she loses her job, gets evicted, goes to said married man's house, the wife lets her live there and she basically starts nannying their adopted daughter. This is just a whirlwind of events. When she fantasized about him punching her and then asking him to punch her, I was speechless. <br/><br/>This book did keep me intrigued but I am just unsure about how I felt about it. I didn't hate it but I also didn't love it."
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