Luster

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book of the Year WINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The New York Times Book Review, O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Shondaland, Boston Globe, and many more! "So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven Leilani's first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill." -Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Book Review No one wants what no one wants. And how do we even know what we want? How do we know we're ready to take it? Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties-sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage-with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren't hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric's home-though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows. Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani's Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life-her hunger, her anger-in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way. "An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that's blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy." -Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine

Raven Leilani's debut novel, Luster, was an instant New York Times bestseller and widely lauded a best book of the year. Luster won the NBCC John Leonard Prize, Kirkus Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and VCU Cabell First Novel Prize, among others. Leilani has been a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library and served as an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, and The Cut, among other publications. Leilani was selected as a National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree and received her MFA from NYU. She lives in Brooklyn.