'Luster' by Raven Leilani is a book that left me feeling very ambivalent. It tells the story of Edie, a young black woman who due to her childhood experiences is compelled to behave in ways that are harmful to her and others. She develops first an internet, and then a real life relationship with Eric (a married man), and gradually becomes embroiled in his family, forging an uncomfortable relationship with his wife and adopted daughter.

For me this was a compelling read, but not an enjoyable one. Like Candice Carty-Williams 'Queenie'; 'Luster,' brilliantly depicts the human flaws in Edie without giving into current narratives about how black women can be depicted (saint or slave, or both). There are occasions I marvelled at the writing, and the cleverness of the similes used, but I didn't find it comic - in fact I often found it a very sad, and anxiety provoking read. This was particularly due to some of the things Edie does, and a sense that she is re-enacting trauma. Like some of the other characters in the novel, I felt compelled to care for Edie and also to push her away.

Therefore whilst I felt this was a well written book, deserving of plaudits and praise, it isn't a book that I loved in the sense that I want to return to the world it depicts. Perhaps things are just to tumultuous in 2020 for me to enjoy reading about this level of complexity, despite it feeling very realistic.

Edie is a walking disaster, barely holding onto her job, involved with a married man, living in a tiny and mice-infested flat, barely making ends meet. She is tough and funny though and I liked the writing - at times clinical and at times really funny and full of emotions. At times it was uncomfortable to read but I enjoyed the messiness and the tenderness of it.

Reading this I could instantly see why this is as hyped as it is. This is a book of contradiction, it's unpleasant and uncomfortable to read but in the way that you are hooked and can't put it down.
The story follows 23 year old Edie who starts an affair with a married man, and then finds herself moving in with his family.
Initially the wife, Rebecca, is wary of Edie but seeing their relationship change and evolve was my favourite part of this story.
I really enjoyed this and can't believe that this is a debut, i'll be looking out for more of Leilani's work in the future.

Highly recommend - I can see what the hype is all about. I expect it will be one of 2021's most talked about novels, and I'll be suggesting that all my friends read it. Thanks for the ARC.

This is a tough book to review. To start I’ll say I know that I am not target market or audience. This is very millennial / Gen Z which I am very firmly not. But unlike some books which can transport you back to being that person in their 20s I really struggled to do that with this. Maybe it was the definition of the older man being born in 1977 and I realised I was suddenly of that era, and not the era of our main protagonist.

Eddie is in her 20s in an unsuitable job and going from one failed relationship to another after a troubled childhood. She meets Eric, a forty something married man and starts an affair. After a night at his house when his wife is away she becomes intrigued about his other life and breaks into the house when the family are out. But his wife Rebecca comes back early... and finds her. From this point all normal expectations are out of the window. Rebecca and the daughter know about Edie already. And Rebecca invites her to a party... and to stay.
Messed up relationships are core to this novel. It’s provocative, it’s brutal, it defies convention. The characters are all flawed and aloof. And as a reader I felt it hard to warm to them. Dealing with poverty, class, race, loneliness and screwed up lives. This book really won’t be for everyone. But I know to some it will be everything.

Luster was one of my most anticipated books of the year, and it was better and stranger than i had imagined: its 23 year old protagonist Edie starts an affair with a married man, Eric, and then somehow finds herself moving in with his suburban family – his wife Rebecca and their adopted daughter Akila. i loved the way Leilani writes about edie's relationship to herself as an artist, and like a good character portrait, Luster makes clear that everything edie sees reflects back, shiny and ugly, Edie's flaws and nuances and soft spots magnified. She's messy and sore and immensely compelling, and her story is haunted, haunting, raw.

Edie and Rebecca have one of the most interesting relationships between women i've read this year, and I would've killed for an extra hundred pages of them just circling around each other. But then, the book is so unpleasant, so caustic, that it's hard to imagine it even being a sentence longer than it is. Any moment of tenderness or sweetness in this novel is immediately undercut by the scent of something rotten, which makes it Very Good and also Very Hard to read. Despite it having so many familiar elements, i've never read anything quite like Luster !

thank you to netgalley for this arc!

I found the book very intriguing and unexpected. For a book all about sex, it wasn't very *sexy* – but it was coolly anaesthetised in tone, and clever, and complicated. I enjoyed reading it and am glad to see it gaining so much acclaim.

I flagged it up in my round up of notable new novels on Five Books:

"...One debut that has managed to cut through the noise is Raven Leilani’s Luster. Out now in the US and Canada (but not available in the UK until January), this novel has been endorsed by the likes of Zadie Smith, Brit Bennett and Ling Ma, and highlighted as one of the most anticipated new novels of fall 2020 by everywhere from Vogue to Lithub. It’s about a young black woman working in publishing who begins an affair with a white man in an open marriage—then later comes to live with the couple and their adopted daughter in their family home. The book is an ultra-self-conscious interrogation of power balances, race, loneliness and non-monogamous relationships, and if that sounds intriguing you may be keen to read an excerpt published over at The Cut."

We sell books via the Amazon Affiliates scheme through our website. Clicking on the book will lead to the relevant purchase or pre-order page in whatever territory the reader is in.

I'll flag it up again in my forthcoming notable-novels-of-the-winter round up, for British readers who are waiting for release before ordering.

From the ‘For my mother’ dedication a dark humour infused in the pages of Luster. Disaster artist Edie is hanging onto her dull admin job barely, with 'a laugh that can spill drinks to the uninitiated'.

It begins with a description of sex in the copier room, Gen Z style and there's something Imminently readable about the haphazard narrator who offers highlights of her early life:
'The VHS of Spiceworld I received for my fifth birthday, the barbie I melted in the microwave when no-one was home.'

Eric is her sextor. When they meet IRL after a month of internet repartee it’s awkward; they’ve run out of material, but they carry on and Edie has carried on with others too.
'First dusky cherry. I cannot be the first black girl a white man dates.'
'I am not on the L, smelling someone’s lukewarm pickles wishing I was dead.
This candour is both Edie's calling card and downfall. Her slovenly appearance infects her attitude, she under performs at work, lives in squalor and practices poor personal hygiene, a cringeworthy unexemplar to her only other black colleague.

This wasn't a book without fast-forward moments, Chapter 4 felt like one long expo - the narrative drive hinge as nakedly exposed as many of the points on a character map you work on but don’t share with the reader.
Her life begins to unravel as her behaviour becomes less tolerable to those she encounters. I was a little suprised if she was in a senior position at work - there are assistants below her and she has manager in her job title - she is living in such poor circumstances. These inconsistencies pulled me out of the narrative and I found I began to care less about how she survived despite the raised stakes.
Around page 85, it gets weird and she becomes a part of an uncoventional family moving to live with Eric, his wife Rebecca and Akila their 21 yr old adopted daughter.
Like an episode of Broad City, Luster is clad in humour and high jinks, but lacked an emotional pull. There is sparkle to the prose but a less than lustrous endgame.

Luster by Raven Leilani is definitely the book everyone’s already talking about for 2021. It is about a young woman called Edith, who gets involved with a married man. While the basic plot is something I’ve definitely read before, the prose is sharp and urgent with sections that go off in a tangent that is rhythmic and hypnotic. Eric is in an open marriage, but his wife Rebecca sets the rules, and the relationship between the women becomes far more interesting than the affair that begins the book.

When one too many transgressions at work catch up with Edith, we see how quickly a life can fall apart with no safety nets: Edith doesn’t really have friends to speak of and her parents are gone and wouldn’t have been any help to her anyway. It makes sense then that this life, adrift from any safe places or people to land, could be subsumed by a more forceful entity, that of Eric’s family.

On one hand, I feel like I’ve read novels about lots of reckless, vulnerable women, often working in publishing or creative industries so this didn’t feel too new or surprising. However, the fact that it was about a black woman navigating primarily white spaces, and how she is seen by the white family as a natural resource in their raising a black child was really interesting to me. Edith’s throwaway observations about race and are really interesting, and often appear in her inner monologue as a stream of consciousness following a particular event, which to me are the strongest sections of the book. I’ll be interested to hear what people think of this!

Luster is a great debut, and was quite an interesting read. I’m a 23 year old black woman and in some ways I did feel connected to Edie, but I also thought the writing style made me feel detached from the story. You don’t really get to know any of the characters, and I felt like I was watching the story rather than being immersed in it. However, I’m really excited to see what the author brings out next - I think she’s someone to look out for.

"Luster" is a memorable debut novel in which Raven Leilani paints a portrait of Edie, a young black woman struggling with poverty, racism and autodestructive traits. She gets involved in an affair with an older white man, and a series of events makes her develop an unexpected connection with his wife, Rebecca. The author discusses various issues including being a role model to another black person, past traumas and their effect on your current life, sexuality and self-love.... Edie's narration is full of irony - black humour and sadness, her life unravelling before our eyes until she she hits rock bottom. The writing requires attention and in turn it rewards the reader with sharp observations and raw emotions.

Luster is an eloquently raw debut about loneliness, alienation, and the surprising intersections where we find tenderness. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
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Edie is a 23 year-old with a low-paying, unedifying job, sharing a Brooklyn flat with a family of mice and cockroaches. Her world is one of ugliness exaggerated to the absurd by wanting - her city is pungent and filthy, the men in her office faceless owners of genitalia. Online she finds and quickly disassembles herself to Eric, a white man twice her age in an open marriage. No longer hidden behind the intimacy of their screens, the affair is exposed for what it is. Between his sporadic declarations of love she is meant to discard, ‘suddenly it feels painful to be this ordinary, to be this open to him, as he looks at me and pretends I am not just a cheaper version of a fast Italian car.’ This attempt at being seen leaves her isolated as he retreats back into his marriage. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
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Edie then inadvertently inserts herself into his suburban, family life. She develops an obsession with his wife Rebecca, surprisingly reciprocated when she is invited to their anniversary celebrations, then to be a houseguest and guide to their adopted black daughter Akila. Edie flickers between intimacy and isolation with each of them, moments of bittersweet tenderness peppered in between quotidian estrangement.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
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Leilani excels at portraying the isolation of being black. There is Eric’s awkward over-enthusiasm and caution around blackness, the old woman constantly watching Edie from her window, the role of the token she slips into at work - and which type of token will she be? -, the police who question her and Akila and see a child’s confidence as danger. All of it ‘so mundane it leaves your head spinning, the hand of the ordinary in your slow, psychic death so sly and absurd you begin to distrust your own eyes’. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
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The book is brutally honest about the loneliness in love and the futility of intimacy. Edie considers Eric, ‘parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry?’ Later in one of my favourite quotes from the book, she thinks ‘of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.’

Conversations with Friends meets Ghosts meets Such a Fun Age! This book has so much to say - about relationships, race, adoption, family and our working lives. Honestly, I had no clue where it was going but was fully invested in the characters - extremely thought-provoking, a novel of our times.

I adored this. It was not what I expected in the best possible way. I adored the writing style and the narrative. Will definitely be re-reading.

Even though Luster is not out in the UK until January, it seems like everyone on social media is already talking about it - at least in my little literary bubble! - and rightfully so.

This is a masterful debut. Witty, beautifully written and so powerful on topics such as race, sex, body image and female rivalry. The plot is highly original and thus it’s quite difficult to compare Luster to other novels. The power dynamic between the wonderfully endearing protagonist, Edie, and the white couple she becomes involved with (Eric and Rebecca) play out in a compelling way, and if anything, I was more interested in the ‘friendship’ between Edie and Rebecca than I was in the violent, short lived sex of Edie and Eric. I also loved the couple’s black adopted daughter, Akila, and Edie’s mentoring of her.

Overall, a book not to miss.

It is remarkable how much this book managed to squeeze into relatively few pages. Just when I thought I had the narrative sussed out, it took me by surprise (on several occasions). Such unusual, yet vividly imagined scenarios demonstrate an author's fantastic imagination, as does the wonderfully lovable, complex, striking narrator. The novella offers as many relatable moments as it does surprising ones, and I particularly adored the unexpectedly tender ending. The deadpan humour was also a highlight for me. Such clever writing, and I can't wait to see where this author takes us next!

4*

What a beautiful book. Each word is meaningful and precise, an accurate reflection of the protagonist's thoughts and emotions.

The book is centred around a young, black 23 year old. Edie is a messy, messy person. She makes terrible (mostly sexual) choices at work, is lazy and is rebellious against the same system that seeks to oppress her. Edie gets involved with an older white man who is in an open marriage. All of a sudden, Edie finds herself homeless and moves in with said man's family. Said man's (Eric) family consists of his white wife, Rebecca, and adopted black teen, Akila. Race is a significant theme in this story, hence my emphasis on highlighting each character's skin colour.

The bond between Edie and Akila is heartwarming and really does show why it's so important for young black girls to have other black figures in their life. I was frequently left mildly horrified at Rebecca and Eric's complete disregard for what Akila so obviously needed. It should go without saying that if you are white and are going to adopt a black child, you need to do your research. The problem with Eric and Rebecca is that they tried to be good parents but in doing so, they didn't see how they could be good parents to Akila. It's not about being 'woke' or socially conscious but about understanding the individual needs of that child. So Akila is black, how are you going to handle her hair? Is she comfortable and happy in a predominantly white neighbourhood? This was clearly the point that Raven Leilani aimed to raise, and it is certainly an interesting one. It's a topic that was written about with nuance and in a considerate style.

Following on from that, I loved the narrative style and language. The total detachment of the language vividly conveyed how Edie felt. She is detached from everything in her life. She is detached from other black people, in fact from other people, full stop. She doesn't have any family. She is detached from her job, she is detached from all her sexual encounters. It's a very lonely life, and this is portrayed via the cold language.

At the same time, it was really uncomfortable to see how people treated Edie. Particularly in the case of Eric, he clearly seeked only to totally degrade her. Whilst Rebecca had more reason to treat Edie like shit, it was still done with such malice and passive aggressiveness sometimes that I internally flinched reading about a few of their encounters. On the other hand, their relationship was another weirdly endearing one. Rebecca did the best with what she was given, considering Edie is essentially 'The Other Woman' who is shacking up with her husband.

All in all, a wonderfully written book, which handles different topics not only with tact, but with a different viewpoint. One of my main issues that I come across and that I strongly dislike is when books become too preachy or don't offer a different perspective. Leilani shines a light on widely spoken subjects, but allows us to look into the conversation through a different lens. Final thoughts: buy and read this book! A brilliant debut from Raven Leilani.

A debut worth reading!

This is my kind of writing, sometimes uncomfortable but totally raw and honest.
I enjoyed reading about Edies messy life and painful existence and I look forward to more from this author.

‘I think of how keenly I've been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men’

I devoured this book. It's written with a brazen honesty similar to Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and is clever and insightful about racial and gendered power imbalances in a way that reminded me of Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age. I think many readers will (perhaps reluctantly) recognise aspects of themselves and their youth in Edie, who is an incredibly well-rounded character – fierce and vulnerable in equal measure.

Luster by Raven Leilani starts off as being about a young woman having a fling with an older man but then it changes tone as she gets involved with his whole family. I enjoyed the central character's voice and would read more by this author.