Luster
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Luster Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Raven Leilani (Author), Ariel Blake (Narrator), Picador (Publisher)
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 8,188 ratings
Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction
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Razor sharp, provocatively thrilling and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut.

Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize 2021

Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Fiction Debut of the Year

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021

Edie is just trying to survive. 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. 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 wasn’t already hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s home and family.

A Best Book of the Year: Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Literary Hub, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Time, Good Housekeeping, InStyle, NPR, O Magazine, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, Town & Country, Wired, New Statesman, Vox, Shelf Awareness, i-D, BookPage and more.

One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2020

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Previous page
  1. Listening Length
    6 hours and 39 minutes
  2. Author
    Raven Leilani
  3. Narrator
    Ariel Blake
  4. Audible release date
    January 21, 2021
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Picador
  7. ASIN
    B08KQJ3QDJ
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 6 hours and 39 minutes
Author Raven Leilani
Narrator Ariel Blake
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date January 21, 2021
Publisher Picador
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B08KQJ3QDJ
Best Sellers Rank #321,288 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#3,761 in African American Literature
#4,529 in World Literature (Audible Books & Originals)
#6,274 in Cultural Heritage Fiction

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
8,188 global ratings
Luninously Written, Still Not sure
3 Stars
Luninously Written, Still Not sure
Luminous and edgy, LUSTER is a raw examination of friendship, sex, intimacy, art, and more.I'll admit to *not* wanting to read LUSTER (FSG, September 2020) because, well...it was on so many lists and so frequently talked about in literary circles. But then I wrote to the biblioracle at the Chicago Tribune, where I offered the last five books I'd read and based on those, was given a 'reading' as to what to read next. LUSTER was the recommendation. And so I got the book. I read it. The first few pages I squirmed. What was this? I didn't like it. At all. But, the writing was rich and textured and I continued. And it started to grow on me.Edie is a frosty 23 year old black girl scraping by on a dismal salary in publishing. She really wants to be an artist but she needs to do something to make ends meet. She begins dating Eric, a white man married to a medical examiner and they are in an open-marriage. Yet somehow it doesn't seem as though the wife, Rebecca, is as open about this idea as he claims. They have a daughter, too, who factors into the story.And then Edie finds herself unemployed and ...well, that's when things really start to get interesting. The story is rampant with raw imagery, razor-sharp perception, race, marriage, intimacy, hunger...it's edgy and luminously rendered. There's some deep, but vague backstory, leading readers to interpret what they will about why Edie seems so damaged. But also, too, there's some very blunt, bleeding wounds that shape this woman.The structure is loose and flow-of-consciousness, a fever dream of events cascading in the first person, as Edie sees the world. Each sentence is pulsing with electricity, and the ending is satisfyingly inevitable, that is...it makes perfect sense but isn't all that predictable.I'm still on the fence about whether I liked LUSTER. It might not be a top read for me, but it certainly stretched me as a reader. I found myself studying it a micro-level and while I think I'll remember it because of the ending, because this is a very talented writer and I'm curious to see where her career goes.You might also like FEVER DREAM by Samanta Schweblin meets the work of Karen Russell, Yaa Gyasi.L.Lindsay|Always witha Book
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Top reviews from the United States

Brian Finney
5.0 out of 5 stars A totally new voice
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2021
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Raven Leilani’s Luster is one of the most brilliant and original debut novels I’ve read. It tells the story of Edie, a Black twenty-three-year-old painter, in the first person. She spends the book failing to finish self-portraits just as she fails to get her life together. Painting acts as a figure both for Edie’s desire to come to terms with her life and for Leilani’s attempt to “reproduce an inscrutable thing”¬¬—Edie and her story. In the final section of the book Edie does complete a painting, not of herself, but of Rebecca, the wife of her lover Eric. “A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t.”

Survival is a good description of what Edie does in the course of the book. Survival has no beginning or end, no teleology. Maybe this is what makes the plot so strange. The three major characters seem to act almost without motivation. Edie meets Eric online and drifts into (rather than chooses) a sexual relationship with him. This accounts for the startling opening sentence of the novel: “The first time we have sex we are both fully clothed, at our desks during working hours, bathed in blue computer light.” Edie similarly drifts into a Platonic relationship with Rebecca that ends up with Rebecca inviting Edie to live with her while Eric is away on business. Neither woman ever takes a definitive position regarding the other. Each is drawn to and repelled by the other. As Edie puts it, “we move around each other like two magnets of identical charge.”

Racial and gendered issues hover in the margins of the narrative. But the central focus remains Edie’s refusal to take control of her life, her lack of agency. Things happen to her: she gets sacked from her job; she is evicted from her apartment; she becomes pregnant; she loses the baby; she is moved out of Eric’s and Rebecca’s house. This is a story of bare survival. Edie says at one point, “I am primed to feel more nothing.”

Maybe it is because she refuses to conform to the conventional pattern of such a protagonist that she acquires a unique voice and way of expressing herself. When she is pregnant she muses: “I think I could have this baby out of spite. My parents made me on purpose and look what happened. Spite is more sustainable. It gives you something to prove. . .” Edie’s purposelessness frees her to think outside the norm. So much of what she thinks and says comes as a surprise to the reader.

Notably, Leilani can use language creatively. As the day approaches for Edie to leave Rebecca’s house, the two of them develop a strange alliance:

"Then we move through the day side by side, and I feel like the exception, like there is some vestigial organ we share that is essentially a second tongue, our language furtive and crude and articulated only in private, this feeling in both of us, that we are building something out of glass."

What Leilani wants to decscribe can only be achieved through indirection, through figures of speech (vestigial organ, building something out of glass). Yet it is powerful, original, language unlike anything else you have encountered. That is what keeps you turning the page.
13 people found this helpful
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Avid_Reader
4.0 out of 5 stars Ignore the Hype, Enjoy the Novel
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2020
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The last time I read a highly hyped first novel upon its release was The Art of Fielding in 2011 and even with high expectations, I found that it lived up to the hype. Luster did not quite live up to that standard, but nevertheless provided a highly engaging thought-provoking trip through the experience of the 23-year-old narrator, Edie. Edie is a multi-dimensional character, who rings authentic to me as she navigates her way through life as a Black woman. While a great deal of the hype surrounding the novel was around the author’s depiction of sex with an older white man, what I found more engaging was her relationships with other women, most notably the white wife of her lover and the adopted 12-year-old Black daughter of the couple. The circumstances are obviously fraught and complex and yet the author makes them ring with authenticity. Raven Leilani uses prose that some would describe as a stream of consciousness ( others, perhaps snidely run-on sentences), and initially, I found that prose as energizing as a Sonny Rollins improv solo. However, at some point, the use of it became confusing, if not enervating. Perhaps, it was meant to help the reader understand the sense of confusion Edie is suffering through. Ms. Leilani has a great wit and does a fabulous job of presenting workplace culture. Reading it was an immersive experience and more importantly left me to ponder the characters in the novel as a way to better understand the people around me. In that way, the book is quite an achievement.
51 people found this helpful
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Dave Schwinghammer
3.0 out of 5 stars Literary Style is Annoying
Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2020
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Edie is a black woman searching for a career and a man; she is an editorial assistant at a publishing company, but her real interest is painting.

She falls into a romance with a married man, Eric, who insists that he's in an open marriage. Rebecca, the wife, insists she's an “evolved” woman.

But then Edie is fired from her job, ostensibly because of her attitude. Rebecca lets her stay at their house until she gets on her feet. Neither Rebecca or Eric act like they're in an open marriage. Rebecca seems jealous. Eric seems guilty. An added complication is Akila, the black adopted daughter. She's having a hard time adjusting; Edie thinks they might be able to bond, but that doesn't happen until they connect playing video games, dressing up for Comic.con and dealing with Akila's hair, where Rebecca is clueless.

Edie works on her painting in fits and starts. She roams the house looking for still lifes she can work on. But she's always looking to see “herself” in her painting.

If you read this book, beware of the literary style. Beginning writers are told to show rather than tell and to avoid adjectives, at least not to use more than one in a row as in the “muscular, handsome, blonde hero . . .”. Leilani does this in a way, with long sequences of of commentary and description which might as well be adjectives. When you do this, the story comes to a stop, and the reader has to reread what he/she's just read, at least I do.

Eventually the Edie Rebecca Eric trio comes to an end, but Edies' art comes to the forefront as you should be able to predict.
10 people found this helpful
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AquaBacteria
5.0 out of 5 stars An instant classic
Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2024
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This is a must read, a fabulous novel more than worth the time, and definitely worth revisiting. Just discover it, it is unconventional and you don’t know where you’re going in the best way possible. I wouldn’t spoil it at all.
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Hanna
4.0 out of 5 stars Somehow unpleasant but ultimately absorbing
Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2021
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The style sweeps you along and is quite readable, but mostly the book is pretty depressing and the protagonist’s motivations inscrutable. I found myself very absorbed and moved in the last quarter or so. Overall, an interesting read.
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Top reviews from other countries

Nino
5.0 out of 5 stars na
Reviewed in Germany on July 12, 2023
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ok
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Cait B
5.0 out of 5 stars Juicy story
Reviewed in Canada on February 4, 2021
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I bought this as an e-book. The story is quite good and I read the whole book in a week.
One person found this helpful
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Bárbara
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing first novel!
Reviewed in Brazil on September 27, 2020
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Hard to believe it's Leilani's first novel. I deeply cared about Edie as if she were a friend. I felt for her losses, rooted for her, felt like warning her against bad decisions but most of all, learned to judge less.

Contemporary, relevant, urgent !
One person found this helpful
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Joanne Sheppard
4.0 out of 5 stars Accomplished, uncompromising debut
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 24, 2021
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Luster is Raven Leilani's debut novel. The narrator, Edie, is a twenty-something African American woman who, struggling to pay off her student loans and without the safety net of family to fall back on, finds herself living with her white, middle-aged boyfriend and his wife, and their black adopted daughter. .

The story begins with Edie, the narrator, meeting Eric, who announces that his marriage is an open one. The two begin an affair, which Edie describes in dispassionate, cynical terms. Then, while Eric is away on a business trip, Edie finds herself in desperate circumstances. And it's not Eric who comes to her apparent rescue, but his wife Rebecca.

Luster reminds me slightly of Candice Carty-Williams' Queenie. Edie, the protagonist, has had a similarly traumatic and troubled childhood, is one of the few black employees in her office (she works at a publishing house while Queenie worked in journalism) and regularly makes unwise, self-destructive choices, particularly when it comes to men (specifically, I think, white men). Like Queenie, Edie is struggling to afford her rent in an exceptionally expensive city - this time, New York, where she shares a cockroach-riddled apartment.

But Luster is written in a much more literary style, sometimes self-consciously so, and it's also completely and deliberately missing the warmth and heart of Queenie: it's a bleaker book and a more ambiguous one. Some of the writing is extraordinary and affecting, although there are some moments where the power of the narrative is lost in the language rather than enhanced by it. Moreover, Queenie does, at least, have some positive relationships in her life - not with men, certainly, but with friends and relatives - while Edie is without family and without friends. She and her flatmate barely seem to speak and her working relationships are uneasy at best and sourly dysfunctional at worst. Her relationship - if you can call it that - with Eric is downright disturbing, and there are elements that become more so once we learn that his adopted daughter is black.

However, it's with that daughter, Akila, that Edie makes what seems to be her only positive human connection with another person. Akila, like Edie, has been orphaned in traumatic circumstances and is friendless at school. While she doesn't want for material things, she is a black child with white parents in a predominantly white neighbourhood. She bonds with Edie over video games and comics, but what's most touching is Edie's long and complicated quest to teach Akila how to look after her afro-textured hair. Towards the end of the book, Edie and Akila are stopped by the police and treated appallingly, another common experience for African American people which Eric and Rebecca cannot hope to understand.

Edie herself is the sort of protagonist you don't have to like to find interesting and, crucially, to feel sympathy for. She is a mass of flaws and neuroses and extremely self-absorbed, but it's not difficult to see why. She's utterly alone in the world and through no fault of her own is constantly one pay cheque away from homelessness, which leaves her open to exploitation - by employers, by landlords, by the men she meets, and by affluent white people who are simultaneously fascinated by and wary of her (embodied in Luster principally by Rebecca, who can't quite decide whether Edie is something to be feared, studied or used).

That said, I did find myself rolling my eyes at Edie more than once. She makes the same mistakes repeatedly and seems to learn nothing from them. At the start of the book, we find her working in publishing, a job which she describes as if it's akin to working in McDonald's, and the reader is apparently supposed to agree with her.

And yet her job is by most standards a highly desirable one in a competitive industry which tends to favour affluent middle-class applicants who can afford to take on unpaid internships for experience. Her role is not the most exciting one out there, but she has her foot in the door and manages a small team, which is certainly more than I did at 23. And while I certainly sympathised with her living situation in a squalid flatshare, I was merely annoyed when Edie mentions that the only cutlery in the apartment consists of three butter knives: she is not a child, has been living independently from a young age and is not so poor that she can't afford to buy herself a knife and fork. I found that slightly self-conscious, hapless millennial persona slightly irksome, although I recognise that this an issue with me, and not with the book.

There are some odd, almost surreal moments in Luster, which at first I found a little jarring, but as the story develops they do seem to fit well with Edie's fragile state of mind. It's not always clear whether Edie's reading of a situation is an accurate one, or whether she's interpreting people's motives correctly. The awkwardness of her interactions is almost painful at times, and this sense of things being constantly 'off' is enhanced by the sheer oddness of her relationship with Rebecca. Edie is a talented artist and when she begins to draw everything around her, it's almost as if she's dissociating, stepping outside her own environment and looking in, or perhaps trying to make sense of the world by committing it to paper.

Luster has a lot to say about racial and sexual politics and about guilt and exploitation. Artistically, it feels pleasingly uncompromising. Even at the times when they didn't quite work as I felt they were meant to, Leilani's decisions on character and style in this book are impressively brave. It's an accomplished debut and I hope to see more from the author.
22 people found this helpful
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Monksilver
5.0 out of 5 stars Evidently written by a highly creative and acutely observant author.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 26, 2024
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Just to say I loved this novel and I very much looked forward to reading it every day. I love the inventive, vivid style of writing which brought the scenes to life. I felt empathy for the protagonist and wanted to give her a huge helping of self-worth (relationship-wise). This novel provides a glimpse into the experience of a young black woman in New York, without overstatement. The reader's own imagination (aided by the author's skill) provides deeper insight.
If Raven Leilani ever writes a sequel to this novel I will certainly be reading it, because I care about Edie.
I look forward to reading more of this talented writer's work.
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