Search  for anything...
Picador

Luster

    • Based on 8,350 reviews
Condition: New
Checking for product changes
$8.36 Why this price?
Save $8.64 was $17.00

Buy Now, Pay Later

As low as $2 / mo
  • – 4-month term
  • – No impact on credit
  • – Instant approval decision
  • – Secure and straightforward checkout

Ready to go? Add this product to your cart and select a plan during checkout. Payment plans are offered through our trusted finance partners Klarna, PayTomorrow, Affirm, Afterpay, Apple Pay, and PayPal. No-credit-needed leasing options through Acima may also be available at checkout.

Learn more about financing & leasing here.

Free shipping on this product
This item's return window has been extended for the holiday season: Returnable until Jan 31, 2025

To qualify for a full refund, items must be returned in their original, unused condition. If an item is returned in a used, damaged, or materially different state, you may be granted a partial refund.

To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.

View our full returns policy here.

Availability: Only 4 left in stock, order soon!
Fulfilled by Amazon
Arrives Sunday, Nov 24
Order within 15 hours and 20 minutes
Available payment plans shown during checkout

Description

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Shondaland, The New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, Buzzfeed, Kirkus, Time, Good Housekeeping, InStyle, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Self, The New York Public Library, Town & Country, Wired, Boston.com, Happy Mag, New Statesman, Vox, Shelf Awareness, Chatelaine, The Undefeated, Apartment Therapy, Brooklyn Based, The End of the World Review, Exile in Bookville, Lit Reactor, BookPage, i-D A FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Barack Obama A BEST BOOK FOR HOLIDAY GIFTS: AV Club, Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine/The Strategist, The Rumpus WINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER "So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven Leilani’s first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill." ―Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Book Review “An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that’s blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy.” ―Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine 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. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador Paper (June 8, 2021)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250798671


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 71


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.45 x 0.65 x 8.26 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #46,180 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1,239 in Family Life Fiction (Books) #1,565 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction #3,727 in Literary Fiction (Books)


#1,239 in Family Life Fiction (Books):


#1,565 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction:


Frequently asked questions

If you place your order now, the estimated arrival date for this product is: Sunday, Nov 24

Yes, absolutely! You may return this product for a full refund within 30 days of receiving it.

To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.

View our full returns policy here.

  • Klarna Financing
  • Affirm Pay in 4
  • Affirm Financing
  • Afterpay Financing
  • PayTomorrow Financing
  • Financing through Apple Pay
Leasing options through Acima may also be available during checkout.

Learn more about financing & leasing here.

Similar Products

Top Amazon Reviews

    • A totally new voice
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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2021 by Brian Finney
    • Ignore the Hype, Enjoy the Novel
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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2020 by Avid_Reader
    • Literary Style is Annoying
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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2020 by Dave Schwinghammer

Can't find a product?

Find it on Amazon first, then paste the link below.