“What the actual?!” I have never said and thought this phrase more than I have in the last month reading Raven Leilani’s Luster.

I recently described it as ‘very fucked up and difficult to read, but the beautiful sentences have made me stay the course’ – I probably phrased it less eloquently at the time but that’s what I thought when taking in the 227 pages that often felt like an exaggerated pitch for an HBO show (you know, dimly lit with all of the fucked up sex and drugs).

In short: Edie is a traumatized, touch-starved, poverty-stricken artist, who starts an affair with a very boring, middle-aged married man (I think his name was Tom, no James, no Michael, no no Eric – see, unmemorable at best). In the middle of their punch-me-fuck-me shenanigans, Eric’s wife, Rebecca (who we are told knows about the affair) moves Edie into the marital home on the day she has quite literally hit rock bottom, with no job, no money and nowhere to live.

The move isn’t benevolent, Rebecca wants someone, someone Black, to act as some kind of hand-holding older sister to her adopted Black daughter. The whole thing is insane. Edie has nowhere else to go, so she stays. Carries on with that man, befriends the daughter (Akila – who is arguably the only person I even liked and rooted for on this whole thing), and lives off random monetary offerings Rebecca leaves her – until she falls pregnant.

As I said, story-wise – hated it, Edie was living through the wound from onset and throughout. I suppose her upbringing was the catalyst for some of the chaos that was her lived experience, to be fair she couldn’t make better choices because she often didn’t have the liberty to truly choose. But Raven is such a good writer that I stayed the course despite myself to find more of her tragic, curt and heart-wrenching sentences and passages. Some of my “best bits” below: