Luster

(Hardback, Large Print Edition)

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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER
WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER

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

"An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that's blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy." --Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine

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.

Reviews

An Instant New York Times Bestseller, Los Angeles Times Bestseller, National Indie Bestseller
Longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Best Reviewed Novel of the Week at Book Marks
A Book Club Pick at Goop, Belletrist, Marie Claire, Esquire, Book of the Month Club (add-on), Green Apple Books, Odyssey Bookshop, Bull Moose Bookstore, and Books on the Subway

**One of the Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2020**
Vogue, Elle, Time, The New York Times, Good Morning America online, The Washington Post, Esquire, The Chicago Tribune, Harper's Bazaar, Shondaland, Goop, Vulture, The Huffington Post, Parade, USA Today, COLORLINES, Literary Hub, Pittsburgh City Paper, Bust, Buzzfeed, Ms. Magazine, Electric Literature, Refinery29, PopSugar, The Millions, The Rumpus, Observer, Book Riot, Thrillist, Domino, PureWow, PopSugar, New York Amsterdam News, Debutiful, Write or Die Tribe, Book Bub, Odyssey, Suitcase, We Are Bookish, Apartment Therapy, Paperback Paris, Bookshop.org, Green Apple Books

"Exacting, hilarious, and deadly . . . A writer of exhilarating freedom and daring."
--Zadie Smith, Harper's Bazaar

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

"[Raven Leilani] is a sharp phrasemaker . . . [and] Luster, a highly pleasurable interrogation of pleasure . . . There is more than a touch of Ralph Ellison here, the hypervisible invisible woman who is cast by the world in categorical terms while trying to be seen for herself."
--Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

Darkly funny with wicked insight . . . This keenly observed, dynamic debut is so cutting, it almost stings.
--Lauren Puckett, Elle

"Edie is an African American woman, but not every African American woman is Edie. What's best about Luster is precisely her messy, unabashed individuality. As she explores the world around her, Edie addresses us in a funny, shrewd narrative voice that precisely describes the wide-ranging contours of her life, be it losing her virginity, watching Rebecca cut up cadavers, going to Comic-Con or showing how police respond to two young Black women walking in a suburban neighborhood."
--John Powers, NPR

"Wildly beguiling . . . [Raven Leilani is] a phenomenal writer, her dense, dazzling paragraphs shot through with self-effacing wit and psychological insight."
--Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

"This debut novel from powerhouse writer Raven Leilani . . . deftly subverts the white gaze while also crafting an unforgettable protagonist. But the real fire here is Leilani's writing. Her sentences are gorgeous, and both the prose and the content will make you sweat."
--Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

"Blistering . . . thrums with observational humor . . . Luster is not a novel concerned with romantic drama. It's all about attention--why we crave it and what forms it takes. Leilani carefully pulls the strings of Edie, Rebecca, Eric and Akila, revealing how lonely they all are . . . Unsettling and surreal."
--Annabel Gutterman, Time

"Strange, hilarious, important."
--Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post

"An emotional rollercoaster that will have you on the verge of tears or in stitches with laughter."
--Sian Babish, The Chicago Tribune

Leilani has a blistering talent for describing a moment while refusing to name its undercurrents . . . Leilani [has a] remarkable ability to turn straight sex into something terrifyingly strange yet familiar, almost as if Edie is reproducing an othering, fetishized gaze for what is considered normal. But Luster is also an interesting meditation on social ethics . . . Luster seems like the first crashing of a new wave of fiction defined by a world where all the traditional vocabularies for morality have gone defunct.
--Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic

There is nothing on offer like Luster--the story of a Black woman who is neither heroic nor unduly tragic . . . She is destructive but tender, ravenous for experience but deeply vulnerable--and often wickedly funny."
--Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

"On every page a shudder of recognition, then a lol, then an electroshock. It's gutting and hilarious and lush. Every detail builds so beautifully, I don't want to spoil anything, but if you want to forget yourself in a passage . . . 100 times over, this is your next read."
--Tavi Gevinson on Instagram

This novel is ridiculously good: gorgeous, dark, and funny, with sentences that'll wreck you. I will follow this author anywhere she wants to take me.
--Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

"Narrated with fresh and wry jadedness, Edie's every disappointment [is] rendered with a comic twist . . . Edie's life is a mess, her past is filled with sorrow, she's wasting her precious youth, and yet, reading about it all is a whole lot of fun."
--Chloe Schama, Vogue

"Luster is the kind of novel that makes a writer jealous . . . [It] brims with the kinds of masterful sentences one can imagine mentors like Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer underlining with linguistic glee. It gleams, as the title suggests, with words and ideas both profound and deeply honest."
--Isabel Jones, InStyle

"A darkly funny, hilariously moving debut from a stunning new voice. Luster follows the unforgettable Edie, a hapless young woman suffocating under her own loneliness, whose caustic observations made me laugh out loud and gasp in recognition. Raven Leilani crafts a beautiful, bighearted story about intimacy and art that will astound and wound you. I couldn't put this one down."
--Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half

There are pages in this book so good they burn your fingers.
--Garth Greenwell on Twitter

"Promises to be an August hit . . . As Edie searches for her identity as an artist and a Black woman, she spins a tale of intrigue and coming-of-age, all with electric storytelling."
--Zibby Owens, Good Morning America online

"The most thrilling thing I've read in months."
--Stephanie Danler on Instagram

"An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that's blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy."
--Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine

"Compulsively readable."
--Emma Specter, Vogue

"Like all great books, Luster eludes easy categorization. It's a slippery novel about many things--being young, being Black, being a woman, being depressed, feeling lonely, latent trauma, sex . . . What is so immediately striking about Luster--and what sets it apart from the glut of millennial fiction--is the quality of the writing itself."
--Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed News

"Vibrant, spiky . . . Leilani is a master . . . a major new talent . . . Luster isn't just a sardonic book, but a powerful one about emotional transformation."
--Mark Athitakis, USA Today

"Mercilessly funny and sharp, Raven Leilani's Luster is unexpected and utterly fascinating."
--Megan DiTrolio, Marie Claire

"Sinking into the pleasures of Leilani's darkly funny and bitingly insightful prose over an aimless shut-down weekend is a treat you deserve. With a highlighter in one hand and Luster in the other, chapter one alone becomes a riot of yellow stripes."
--Erin Keane, Salon

"An unstable ballet of race, sex, and power. Leilani's characters act in ways that often defy explanation, and that is part of what makes them so alive, and so mesmerizing: Whose behavior, in real life, can be reduced to simple cause and effect Sharp, strange, propellent--and a whole lot of fun."
--Kirkus, starred review

"Luster is the best debut novel of the year. It glitters, it pulses, it lives! Simultaneously full of pain and laughter."
--Emma Straub on Twitter

"A rocket-paced, sensual fever dream of sex, trauma, relationships and conflicting perceptions . . . Luster is intoxicating and surprising, never letting readers settle into recognizable patterns. Leilani has crafted an unforgettable novel about a young woman making her own way."
--Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness

"What stands out here is Leilani's prose, which is breathless, frantic, and reads like a Twitter wit grew legs and an IRL identity."
--Hillary Kelly, Vulture

"Sexy, funny, and wholly self-aware, Luster couldn't come at a better time."
--Thrillist

"Raven Leilani's sentences pulse and writhe and shimmer and gut-punch. Above all they tell the truth, even when it hurts."
--Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House

"The narrative voice of this startling novel is layered, complex, pitch-black comic, and deadly earnest, even ardent in its will to sift through the chaos and idiocy of our madhouse culture and find

Author Bio

Raven Leilani's work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern,
Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from
NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Luster is her first novel.