Luster

Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Debut of the Year Longlisted for the Women`s Prize For Fiction 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. 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.