<p><b>'A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. It's brutal&mdash;and brilliant.' - Zadie Smith</b><br><br><b>Winner of the </b><b>Dylan Thomas Prize </b><br><b>Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Debut of the Year<br>Longlisted for the Women's Prize For Fiction</b><br><br>Edie is just trying to survive. She&rsquo;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&rsquo;t really know what she&rsquo;s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hook-up. 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t already hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric&rsquo;s home and family.<br><br>Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, <i>Luster</i> by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.<br><br><b>&lsquo;A book of pure fineness, exceptional.&rsquo; &ndash; Diana Evans, <i>Guardian</i></b><br><br><b>A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: <i>Guardian</i>,<i> New York Times</i>, <i>New Yorker</i>, <i>Boston Globe</i>, <i>Literary Hub</i>, <i>Vanity Fair</i>, <i>Los Angeles Times</i>, <i>Glamour</i>, <i>Time</i>, <i>Good Housekeeping</i>, <i>InStyle</i>, NPR, <i>O Magazine, Buzzfeed</i>, <i>Electric Literature</i>, <i>Town &amp; Country</i>, <i>Wired</i>, <i>New Statesman</i>, <i>Vox</i>, <i>Shelf Awareness</i>, <i>i-D</i>,<i> BookPage</i> and more.</b><br><br><b>One of Barack Obama&rsquo;s Favourite Books of 2020</b></p>