Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021
“A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It’s brutal - and brilliant.” — Zadie Smith
Meet Edie. Edie is not OK. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is 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 hook-up.
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 wasn’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 is a painfully funny coming-of-age story told by a fresh new voice.
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