Luster

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for Best First Book Winner of the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize Finalist for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel Longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Named Best Book of the Year by O: the Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Town and Country, Amazon, Indigo, NPR, Harper’s Bazaar, Kirkus Reviews, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping Sharp, comic, disruptive, and tender, Luster sees a young Black woman fall into art and someone else's open marriage. 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's also, secretly, haltingly, figuring her way into life as an artist. 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 falling into Eric's family life, his home. She becomes a hesitant friend to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie is the only Black woman who young Akila knows. Razor-sharp, darkly comic, sexually charged, socially disruptive, Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life 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.

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, and the Dylan Thomas Prize 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.

Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize 2021 Longlisted for the Women's Prize For Fiction 2021 The Sunday Times Bestseller 'A book of pure fineness, exceptional.' Diana Evans, Guardian 'A giddy joy, crafted with mischievous perfection.' Mail on Sunday 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. Razor sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now. 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.

From the author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes - Once luxury was available only to the rarefied and aristocratic world of old money and royalty. It offered a history of tradition, superior quality, and a pampered buying experience. Today, however, luxury is simply a product packaged and sold by multibillion-dollar global corporations focused on growth, visibility, brand awareness, advertising, and, above all, profits. Award-winning journalist Dana Thomas digs deep into the dark side of the luxury industry to uncover all the secrets that Prada, Gucci, and Burberry don't want us to know. Deluxe is an uncompromising look behind the glossy façade that will enthrall anyone interested in fashion, finance, or culture.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Peter Robinson a "master of the police procedural" (Mail on Sunday) returns with the twenty-sixth instalment of the #1 bestselling Inspector Banks series. A skinny young boy is found dead--his body carelessly stuffed into a wheelie bin. Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his team are called to investigate. Who is the boy, and where did he come from? Was his body discarded, or left as a warning to someone? He looks Middle Eastern, but no one on the East Side Estate has seen him before. As the local press seize upon an illegal immigrant angle, and the national media cover the story of another stabbing, there is a less newsworthy death: a middle-aged heroin addict found dead of an overdose in another estate, scheduled for redevelopment. Banks finds the threads of each case seem to be connected to the other, and to the dark side of organized crime in Eastvale. Does another thread link to his friend Zelda, who is coming to terms with her own dark past? The truth may be more complex--or much simpler--than it seems . . .

In this story for readers of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Man Called Ove, when all seems lost, he finds what matters most. Walter Lavender Jr. is a master of finding. A wearer of high-tops. A maker of croissants. A son keeping vigil, twelve years counting. But he wouldn’t be able to tell you. Silenced by his motor speech disorder, Walter’s life gets lonely. Fortunately, he has The Lavenders—his mother’s enchanted dessert shop, where marzipan dragons breathe actual fire. He also has a knack for tracking down any missing thing—except for his lost father. So when the Book at the root of the bakery’s magic vanishes, Walter, accompanied by his overweight golden retriever, journeys through New York City to find it—along the way encountering an unforgettable cast of lost souls. Steeped in nostalgic wonder, The Luster of Lost Things explores the depths of our capacity for kindness and our ability to heal. A lyrical meditation on why we become lost and how we are found, from the bright, broken heart of a boy who knows where to look for everyone but himself.

After the release of Anita Rau Badami's critically acclaimed first novel, Tamarind Mem, it was evident a promising new talent had joined the Canadian literary community. Her dazzling literary follow-up is The Hero's Walk, a novel teeming with the author's trademark tumble of the haphazard beauty, wreckage and folly of ordinary lives. Set in the dusty seaside town of Toturpuram on the Bay of Bengal, The Hero's Walk traces the terrain of family and forgiveness through the lives of an exuberant cast of characters bewildered by the rapid pace of change in today's India. Each member of the Rao family pits his or her chance at personal fulfillment against the conventions of a crumbling caste and class system. Anita Rau Badami explains that "The Hero's Walk is a novel about so many things: loss, disappointment, choices and the importance of coming to terms with yourself and the circumstances of your life without losing the dignity embedded in all of us. At one level it is about heroism - not the hero of the classic epic, those enormous god-sized heroes - but my fascination with the day-to-day heroes and the heroism that's needed to survive all the unexpected disasters and pitfalls of life."

Beautifully decorated cookies are within reach for every home baker, thanks to the easy and practical methods developed by cookie-crafting enthusiasts Valerie Peterson and Janice Fryer. From rolling and cutting to flooding and piping, you’ll find dozens of techniques to turn plain cookies into fun treats for your next special occasion. With instructions for making stand-up cookies, tips on creating icing color palettes, and advice on freezing and shipping, the cookie fun never stops!

Photographer Mirjam Bleeker and interior designer Frank Visser have enjoyed a friendship and creative partnership for over eighteen years. During this time, they have traveled the world together, often with no particular itinerary, seeking out the people and places that inspire a sense of adventure. During their travels, they have stayed in a range of settings, private homes and 'retreats, ' meeting an eclectic mix of people choosing to make their lives by the sea. The photographs in this collection are beautiful, capturing the imagination, they reflect the colors of water and sky, filled with the bleached driftwood, shells and pebbles found on the shoreline, the 'music' of the ocean, the seabirds and the waves re-created in the internal fabric of the buildings, on porches, under canvas, framed in the windows and through the open doors. This book brings these far-flung places to life, with images of white-washed walls, rusted corrugated iron roofs, strings of faded flags fluttering in the breeze, lazy hammocks, footprints in the sand from Bali to Senegal, Costa Rica, Chile, India and Italy; pure escapism.

The thrilling second novel from the author of The Chalk Man, about a teacher with a hidden agenda who returns to settle scores at a school he once attended, only to uncover a darker secret than he could have imagined. Joe never wanted to come back to Arnhill. After the way things ended with his old gang--the betrayal, the suicide, the murder--and after what happened when his sister went missing, the last thing he wanted to do was return to his hometown. But Joe doesn't have a choice. Because judging by what was done to that poor Morton kid, what happened all those years ago to Joe's sister is happening again. And only Joe knows who is really at fault. Lying his way into a teaching job at his former high school is the easy part. Facing off with former friends who are none too happy to have him back in town--while avoiding the enemies he's made in the years since--is tougher. But the hardest part of all will be returning to that abandoned mine where it all went wrong and his life changed forever, and finally confronting the shocking, horrifying truth about Arnhill, his sister and himself. Because for Joe, the worst moment of his life wasn't the day his sister went missing. It was the day she came back. With the same virtuosic command of character and pacing she displayed in The Chalk Man, C.J. Tudor has once again crafted an extraordinary novel that brilliantly blends harrowing psychological suspense, a devilishly puzzling mystery, and enough shocks and thrills to satisfy even the most seasoned reader.

Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize and the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020. “The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.

Don Bogen’s latest volume, Luster, takes on everything from bullhorns to the cultivation of olive trees in poems that are sharp-edged and open to surprise. They capture not just things themselves but the essential contexts—history, power, the personal and the social—that give them meaning. The stylistic dexterity and range of approaches here make the book as rich as the world it engages. Luster includes evocations of place and memory, character studies of figures from Coleridge to Tarzan, a verse epistle, and an extended meditation on machines in our daily lives, all within an overarching vision. From racehorses to waterwheels to great cities, Bogen illuminates “things that go,” in both their dynamism and their inevitable decay. Luster traces the sheen of human activity that clings to the world around us: imperfect, irrevocably marred by time, but always gleaming.

An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the National Book Award-winning author of Trust Exercise and A Person of Interest Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife. My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.

A “provocative and seductive debut” of desire and doubleness that follows the life of a young Palestinian American woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities as she endeavors to lead an authentic life (O, The Oprah Magazine) On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12–year–old Palestinian–American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter. Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought–after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her. Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings—for love, and a place to call home.

As an undercover operative for the Constellation League, Marcos Starlaw’s current assignment is a dangerous mission. Posing as a low-end gem merchant, he must infiltrate the Delta Seven mining colony to discern whether pirates have overrun the planet as his superiors suspect. Still, he expects to return home soon, back into the arms of the many women who eagerly await his return. Burned and scarred by torture, Nova Drayton has lived the past two years in a cave, waiting for someone to help her people. The governor of her home world is a lying, thieving traitor who has taken up with the Limaxian pirates that have overrun her society. They’ve killed many innocents, including her parents and fiancé. Realizing law enforcers may never come—that they’ve likely forgotten their promise to so much as patrol her beleaguered colony—Nova now hates everything having to do with the vaunted Constellation League and its pretentious officers. When Marcos comes face to face with the pirates and a weapon of mass destruction, he makes a critical mistake, blowing his cover. If Nova doesn’t help Marcos escape the pirates … well, he’s already one heartbeat away from taking his last breath. How can he convince a girl who’s lived through hell that he’s the one she’s been waiting for? With nothing left but their own ingenuity, the pair must find a way to ally or die at the hands of cutthroats. Sensuality Level: Sensual

A collection of astonishing photos from around the world, which the editors stumbled upon during their many hours on the world wide web. The book is a cross between a cabinet of curiosities and a documentary on the human species, offering a unique insight into contemporary amateur photography. Photos like these are avidly shared on social media and this book makes you think about the how, where and why of this phenomenon. They are often accompanied by the acronym 'WTF' on social media and websites, reflecting the incomprehension of anyone who gazes at these photos as well as the uneasy feeling that overcomes the 'voyeur' when he sees them. All these pictures combined emphasise the astounding pace at which countless anonymous spectators are exposed to these extraordinary images, and how the extraordinary increasingly becomes the norm to which we have all become accustomed. 180 colour images

Do you really value the objects around you or are they just "things" to you? The premise of this book is that part of the pleasure of life-contentment that we can cultivate no matter how much or how little we have-comes from the conscious appreciation of the beauty and the significance of everyday things. Through photographs and poems, the author takes you on a voyage of discovery through the world around you. You are shown, sometimes playfully and sometimes profoundly, that even the simplest of things-a shirt and tie, a kitchen colander, a closed door, or a blue butterfly-can have a shining beauty, secret story, and surprising meaning. Along the way, you are gently reminded that such objects deserve to be "warmed with much handling" and gazed upon with pleasure and gratitude as the tiny treasures they are.

They say that whatever you're going through in life, Aretha has probably recorded a song about it. Well, it's not just Aretha. Just been dumped? Roy Orbison has the song to get you through. Furious about the state of the world? Patti Smith knows how you feel. 'The Illustrated Book of Songs' is a collection of lists about the music that makes up the soundtrack to our lives, featuring hundreds of songs, old and new, famous and not-so-famous. With intriguing trivia, idle musings and cool illustrations of your favourite performers and songs. Illustrations: Patricia Ghijsens-Ezcurdia.

Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future. The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories -- and with the American Dream itself -- and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize. In a series of incisive essays, Smith exposes the stark contradictions at the heart of American life, holding all of us, individually and as a nation, to account. We've gotten used to looking away, but the fissures and casual violence of institutional oppression are ever-present. There is a future that is not as grim as our past. In this profound work, Smith helps us envision it with care, honesty, and imagination.

"From the best-selling author of Maine, a gorgeous, compulsively-readable novel that tells the story of the complex relationship between two women, Elisabeth, a privileged new mother and writer attempting to find her footing after childbirth, and Sam, the idealistic, working-class college student she hires to nanny her young son"--