Luster

Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her: painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hookup. And then she meets Eric, a white middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort of agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics as a young black woman weren’t already hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling headfirst into Eric’s home and family.

Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning, and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.