Our Well-Read Black Girl book club chats about the debut novel of a young Black woman who falls into art and someone else's open marriage.

ABOUT THE CLUB

The Well-Read Black Girl Book Club is a national book club started by Glory Edim that meets physically within Indie Bookstores. We read books that center on Black women and non-binary folk's stories and all are welcome to attend. The club reads a variety of genres, classics, new literature and nonfiction, and YA that covers the breadth of experience from the diaspora. Loyalty's club often reads along with the national club recs and sometimes reads local area authors from Chocolate City. We often feature selections from the Well-Read Black Girl Anthology as well.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

"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

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.