Open water is a really beautifully written, poetical novel (or maybe novella).
The novel is an exploration of love and identity, male masculinity and a constant awareness that racism may impact on their lives at any time. Two black Londoners with similar backgrounds, both won scholarships to private schools, both struggled to fit in, and used coping methods, him with his basketball and her with her dancing. When they meet, he is a photographer and she is a dancer, they become friends and later lovers. The novel centres on their intense relationship and in the background there is the threat of racism and police harassment. The novel is moving and poignant with many references to black culture (music, books and films).

This book is unusual in its use of second-person narration which has the strange effect of making it universal and personal yet there is also a detachment from the events that take place.

Nelson's prose is breathtakingly beautiful at times and I bookmarked so many prophetic observations as I worked my way through this novel. The story is ultimately an exploration of what it means to be a black male growing up in England today, which, as a white female I have no personal experience of so this book was enlightening.

This is a book about two young people who fall unexpectedly in love at first sight. There is quite a long dalliance between the unnamed characters before their relationship is fully consummated: the meeting of minds and souls being so intense there seems to be a reluctance to move into the relationship fully. However, this true love is short lived as we see the fear of being young, black and male suck the main protagonist into himself. His inability to show weakness and communicate becomes a destructive force which he does not seem to be able to overcome.

Beautifully written in a highly unusual way - go with the flow on this read and enjoy the journey!

A lyrical, reflective journey through the course of one London summer, the relationships and encounters that shape a life, and coming to terms with emotional trauma. So often, while reading this book, I felt I was drifting out onto open water on the currents and eddies of Nelson’s beautiful prose. The central current that carries the narrative forward, is the romance at its heart. But swirling and coursing around and beneath it, are stories about pain, about loss, about living an authentic life and seeing yourself as others see you.

A couple of stumbling blocks: one was the choice to narrate in the second person. Because the main protagonist shares a lot of characteristics with Nelson himself, I read it as an attempt to put some – but not too much - distance between the narrating persona and the protagonist. However I was never really sure whether the narrator is Nelson speaking to himself, or whether he is addressing a collective young black male entity. The other was that sometimes the emotional impact was sacrificed to the style or technique, for instance with some of the deliberate use of repetition. I would read something and take a moment to appreciate the language, thinking ‘wow, that was good!’ but then I think Nelson must also have thought the same thing, because he does it again. But unfortunately, the second time I read the phrase or sentence, it didn’t have the same impact as the first.

Nevertheless, the language is fluid and evocative and, for a jaded old thirty-something like me(!), it certainly brought back a sense of being in your twenties and experiencing the blossoming of a new relationship - the doing nothing except being in each other’s company together, the long phone calls, the seeing each other off at train stations when it becomes a long-distance thing, will all be recognisable to anyone who has been through it. I also loved how London was like a character on its own – the feeling of summer evenings in the city, the crossing of paths with friends and strangers.

Amongst the sweetness of the romance, the book also has a darker flavour in the way it alludes to issues such as the individual and generational impact of institutionalised racism, stop and search policies, and gang culture. However Nelson deals with these with a light touch and without any moralising or preaching, focusing instead on their impact on the psyche of black men and women. Indeed, at one point in the novel, I felt that this tale of what it is like to be a young black man in a city like London, in a society where you are seen as a minority, was in fact the real story Nelson wanted to tell, and the love story was just an excuse to tell it. However, he convincingly entwines the two threads at the end of the book.

Overall, a beautifully-wrought and emotional debut from a very promising new talent. I look forward to more from this author.

4 solid stars.

I received an e-ARC from NetGalley in exchange for providing an honest review.

This book is so beautifully, marvelously written and I can imagine reading it again to delve deeper. I must admit that the way time moves in this confused me at first, but soon I get the hang of it and saw how that added to the fluidity of the story-telling. The prose is truly some of the most wonderful I have read, certainly the best recently.

As an outsider, this book has also given me greater insight into what it means to be Black--specifically a Black man--and for that, I thank the author.

This is a beautiful novella which I devoured in a day.

It took me a while to take to the unusual second-person narrative, but it made the story feel so relevant and universal.

Both our narrator and his love are nameless, a technique I really love. They are both black British artists living in London and Dublin, coping with love and blackness and art and life.

It’s a beautiful, devastating and wonderful love story. I read it in a few hours but wish I had taken more time to savour the prose.

This is such a hard book to describe but read it, it’s gorgeous.

5 stars

This book is a work of art.

Caleb Azumah Nelson writes an achingly beautiful tale about falling in love against the backdrop of trauma, and harsh reality of living life as a Black man in London where racial profiling is a regular occurrence.

Written in second person narrative, it puts us, the reader, in the position of the unnamed main male character and we learn a lot of his inner psyche this way. We never find out the female characters name either. He is a photographer, she is a dancer.

We discover that both characters are young, Black and have both gotten scholarships to private schools. They developed their own things to keep sane in schools that were predominantly White; hers dancing, his basketball. It tenderly and poeticly shows the two of them slowly falling in love but his inner traumas threaten to tear them apart.

"Which came first, the violence or the pain?" His sadness is heartwrenching and having it written in second person narrative makes it all the more emotional.

I don't think I have ever read anything as beautiful.

I'm clearly in the minority in not loving this debut novel which is receiving unanimous praise across the board.

Caleb Azumah Nelson's Open Water takes a second person narrative to tell the story of two young Black British people who meet one day in a pub and experience an instant attraction. Both are artists: he a photographer, she a dancer, and the novel tells the story of their resultant relationship.

There is also a focus within the narrative on Black male identity in the wake of the BLM movement, which was portrayed very well. Whilst I found the male protagonist to be fully realised as a character, the female lead felt somewhat undeveloped in areas, and not fleshed out as much as she perhaps could have been. The writing is beautiful though, and I fully expect to see this on longlists for various literary prizes later this year. Despite not loving this as much as I expected to I'll be interested to see what this author does next.

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

"She tells you she loves you and now you know you don't have to be the sum of your traumas."

Open Water follows two young Black people (never named) who meet at a London pub and fall in love. The writing in this novel is beautiful and poetic - it's only about 150 pages, which I think is the perfect length for this intense and evocative novel.

Open Water explores what it's like to be Black person in a world where you are seen primarily as Black body, the trauma of racism and the effect of police brutality. While dealing with these heavy themes, Nelson also celebrates the love and depth of feeling between the two main characters, as well as highlighting and celebrating Black art. The story is littered with references to Black photographers, authors, films, painters and musicians - Nelson honours Black culture.

There's a vulnerability to this novel too - it's a reflection of and insight into masculinity that you rarely see in the mainstream.

"Sometimes it's easier to hide in your own darkness than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light."

This is a beautiful, emotionally raw and incredibly powerful debut. This book publishes tomorrow and I heartily recommend you pick up a copy and prepare to be emotionally shattered!

Wow - what a debut! I devoured the majority of this book in one sitting. Although it is short, boy is it mighty.

We follow two characters who meet in London, they start off as project collaborators, who become friends, who become best friends, who then find themsleves in a battle between being in love but not quite together but are almost but are not - it's a bit of a tangle.

However, this book is so much more than that it's an insight in to the reality of being a young black man living in our capital city. It's a reflection on masculinity and emotions felt by young men. It's a study on oppression both of race and emotion - it's a journey and I was hooked from start to finish.

The poetic prose is literally to die for!

4.5 ⭐

I was a spectator. Sometimes I stood too far. Most of the time I was too close. But make no mistake. I didn’t intrude. Perhaps a little. But I was invited.

I was there when they first met in that bar. I didn’t catch everything, but I felt everything. A line was sketched that night. The line bifurcated. Unfocused. At one point the line connected her eyes to his talking hands. At another, the line connected his silence to her kindness. But only when the line connected his eyes to hers and hers to his, it resonated. Resonance, a phenomenon of increased amplitude when the frequency of an applied force is equal to a natural frequency of the system on which it acts. It was one thing to be looked at, but another to be seen. Their gazes were powerful, begging to see each other, so much so that the line was vibrating at an increased magnitude. How did I know? I was there, balancing on the line.

I was there when he and she spent time doing nothing. Spend was a peculiar word to use because it signifies giving something away. And who gives away something and gets nothing? People who are in love. People who give away themselves but get nothing in return.

I was there when she fit her crests into his troughs. I was there when London Underground rode on the line forged by him and her. I was there when he and she danced like the ocean waves, marching towards and retreating from one another haphazardly. I was there when he read to her, the freedom in his voice counterbalanced by the trauma in the writing.

I was there when he lost his grandma and when he was losing his grandpa. I sat and wept with him when he laid broken on the kitchen floor. I was immobilised by the merger of our shared loss as he was losing parts of us to the deity above clouds. We were so close together, yet so far apart, separated by black words on white pages that he wrote and that I read.

I tried to walk closer to him when he came to grapple with Newton’s third law: every Black joy has an equal and opposite Black pain. I regretted my ignorance of the pleasure and safety in strolling London night streets, its anonymity gifted by the shadows cast by streetlamp posts and Victorian houses. Because when I turned my head around the corner, I saw him fleeing the darkness. The same darkness that rendered his skin a threat and a suspicion to men and women in uniform. To men and women in uniform with guns. To men and women in uniform with guns and power.

I tried to walk closer to him when he curled up in a room shrouded in depression, curtained from intimacy. But like her, I couldn’t reach him, having curled away myself in my own corner facing my own grief. I looked at him caressing his own pain with his own hands. For such pain so universal amongst Black people yet he decided to carry it alone. Because he knew everyone else was carrying their own. He was helpless and I was unhelpful. One day. Two nights. Three weeks. Four full moons. Five months. Half a year. I was there. I was there when he finally bagged his vulnerability, stepped out of his misery, carried it across that line, unzipped and revealed it all to her with such fervent candour. Can you see me now, he asked. Always have, always will, she answered.

I was there. I saw them. It was a love story. It was a Black story. It was a Black love story. Do you think they saw me too?

A beautiful, emotionally raw book, that I would recommend to everyone. At once a romance novel, but equally so much more than that. It provides a vivid experience of a young, black man living in London and falling in love. It also mentions excellent music, writers, artists throughout, some you’ll have heard of, others you should check out afterwards. A huge thank you to Netgalley and Viking for this ARC.

Open Water tells the story of a couple moving from friendship into love. The pace is languid, the writing, exquisite. It shares the fear of being seen, of being vulnerable. But this fear is more visceral when you are a young, black man who lives with constant fear. Who has experienced first hand, police brutality. Who is haunted by images of violence. This is a man whose fear overwhelms him, and shuts him down. He pushes away the woman who loves him, finding it easier to retreat than to let her see him raw and vulnerable.

We, the reader, get to hear his truth, his fear, his deepest thoughts. He finds the courage to go to his best friend, his lover, his north star - and lets himself be seen, for all he is.

A stunning story, written poetically and with true heart.

TW// police brutality, racism

“You fit the profile. You fit the description. You don’t fit in the box but he has squeezed you in.”

This story centres around two Black British teenagers grappling with their place in society. Both won scholarships to private schools that tend to be focused on academic achievement. However, these two teenagers are talented artists: a dancer and a photographer.

The two meet in a pub and follows their blossoming relationship with the backdrop of growing up Black in a country that time and time again rejects you. The pair seem destined to be together but the world keeps separating them, will they eventually get to stay together?

This book covers such important topics beautifully well. Topics never feel rushed or over-done, they are explored in such emotive manner. There is discussion of love and relationships, systemic racism, police brutality social identity.

No matter how long I spend on this review I’ll never be able to do justice to how beautifully poetic this book is. Since it’s a slightly different writing style to what I’m used to it did take a couple chapters to get settled into but once I was I couldn’t put it down.

I still cannot comprehend that this a debut novel! I highly recommend this stunning story about the Black British teenage experience.

For sure a 2021 favourite!

Thank you to Viking for the ARC!!

Thank you for the chance to read this amazing book.
Great modern day love story that is written so well.

This is a brilliant novel- it is short in length but so full of story, namely of the two young black artists falling in and out of love. Fundamentally this is a love story but it also comments on race throughout. Very much a book that needs to be read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I'm bowled over by this novel. At such a short page length, I wasn't expecting to be so engaged, but Nelson's writing is so beautifully lyrical that less is more. In his writing you can feel the characters falling in love, and the heartbreak when it doesn't work out. The prose is visceral when it comes to the experience of being a black man in contemporary Britain. Nelson is one to watch.

Open Water is, to put it simply, a beautiful love story. Set in London, two young, black artists meet; they fall in and then out of love. In the most lyrical prose you follow their journey whilst they’re trying to understand their place in this world — a world, as the protagonist repeatedly states, that sees them mainly for their bodies, without really ‘seeing’ them for who they truly are.

I finished this novel, or rather novella, in two sittings. I was so drawn into the emotions, the upheaval, the heartbreak, loss and grief, I could feel my way through this book. Entirely written in the second person, which I found slightly irritating at first, I soon forgot about that and was fully immersed. And whilst this is predominantly a love story, it is set against the big question of race — a question that influences the protagonists’ standing in the world by degrees unimaginable to me in my whiteness.

“How strange a life you and other Black people lead, forever seen and unseen, forever heard and silenced. And how strange a life it is to have to carve out small freedoms, to have to tell yourself that you can breathe. “

In brief: this is a stunning debut that I’d highly recommend.

In all honesty I want to keep this short and sweet as I'm aware of how gushy this review is going to be.

So I'll start with one of the boldest claims I've ever made: if all debut books were like this, I'd never read an established author ever again.

I'm completely blown away by Open Water in so many ways.
It brings you to the depths of what it's like to be in love, to experience grief and to feel lost. The story surrounds indentity of young Black men and women in London, and the way Nelson does this is incredibly powerful.

The writing is probably some of the most amazing I've ever experienced. It was poetic and beautiful and I was lost in it - it's no wonder I devoured it. There were these sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious repetitions in words, which really had an impact. It's a short book but I think it's the perfect length.
I find it interesting that you don't know much about the characters but at the same time you know everything because you get so deeply rooted in their emotions and struggles.

It's just class, honestly.

Open Water comes out on the 4th Feb, and I'm endlessly grateful to #NetGalley and Penguin Viking books for the opportunity to read this before its release.

Interesting debut written entirely from a second person POV. There are no breaks or chapters and the story flows from one scene to the next, over time in a very lyrical fashion.

If you can get past the writing style, this is a story about love at first sight, evolving into becoming best friends and then lovers, with a backdrop of blackness in English society. It is as much a story about the relationship between this couple, as it is a story about a man navigating the world, struggling with the desire to be seen and not seen, as well as the violence and vulnerability of being a black person in this time..

The narrator tells his story with a startling vulnerability that at times feels unrelatable. For one he cries a lot, which is good, but also weird in that I tried to think of how many times I have seen the men in my life actually cry. He delves int9 the enormity of his feelings in such depth - great insight into how men feel, but I can’t decide how real it is, and I struggled with empathising with that level of emotion. For someone with that level of awareness, I also struggled to understand why he would push her away like he did and for as long as he did.

This is definitely one of those interesting books but not for me. I struggled to connect with the characters and found the writing style dense and difficult to engage with. However, I expect a lot of other people will really enjoy this, so it’s one of those you have to read and decide for yourself.

Open Water is a tale of romance and young-adulthood among two black people in modern day London. It's written beautifully - almost poetically - although it's still easy to read. Written in second person, which is bizarre in the best way, it was surprisingly easy to relate to / root for our main character, despite my life experiences (as a white woman) being very different to his. Throughout the book, references are made to other black authors, especially James Baldwin, and in my opinion, Caleb Azumah Nelson succeeds in capturing this moment of two people falling in and out of love with the same poetic simplicity of Baldwin.

It's not a long tale, it took me less than half a day to read, and it was well worth my time. I'd highly recommend this book to; well anyone! Especially though if you're interested in reading a representation of the Black-British experience in London. Open Water is a beautiful beautiful book!