Luster: a Novel

Edie is stumbling through her twenties— sharing a subpar apartment in Busbwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inap-propriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fit-fully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital ar-chivist 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 land-scapes 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 depiction of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and of the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves.