Luster (Paperback)

Edie is stumbling through her twenties -- sharing a subpar apartment, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly giving heat and air to the art that simmers insider her. And then she meets Eric, a man with a family in New Jersey, including a wife who has agreed to an open marriage -- with rules. Soon, Edie finds herself invited into Eric's home (not by Eric), where she becomes 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.