Luster
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Ariel Blake
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By:
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Raven Leilani
About this listen
"There is a universal appeal to [Narrator Ariel] Blake's performance as Edie, a protagonist who may be her own worst antagonist. Blake's delivery has an immensely human, relatable quality that makes the listener want the best for Edie as she struggles to make her way in the world." (AudioFile magazine, Earphones Award winner)
An instant New York Times best seller
A New York Times notable book of 2020
National Indie best seller
Los Angeles Times best seller
Washington Post best seller
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 20s - 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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
"Ariel Blake narrates, expertly inhabiting Edie’s knowing and analytical tone, and reveling in the writer’s winding sentences and caustic one-liners." (The Guardian)
“Exacting, hilarious, and deadly.... A writer of exhilarating freedom and daring.” (Zadie Smith, Harper’s Bazaar)
"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)
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Rosemary Rabourne is already struggling to pay the bills when her recently orphaned half sister, Wendy, shows up at her door. Rosemary will try anything to provide for the traumatized teenager—including offering her services as a high-end escort. Leo Glass is the billionaire CEO of a revolutionary social app. He wants the “girlfriend experience”—someone contractually obligated to love him—and he thinks he’s found the perfect match in Rosemary.
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Good but not uplifting story
- By Kim on 08-02-23
By: Rebecca Kelley
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The Opposite of Loneliness
- Essays and Stories
- By: Marina Keegan
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation.
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Probably buy the book too.
- By Soupergirl on 09-14-15
By: Marina Keegan
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Fairyland
- A Memoir of My Father
- By: Alysia Abbott
- Narrated by: Alysia Abbott
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and 80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation - few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco's vibrant cultural scene.
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Great representation of the time
- By AvidReader22 on 06-07-19
By: Alysia Abbott
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Labor Day
- By: Joyce Maynard
- Narrated by: Wilson Bethel
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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In a manner evoking Ian McEwan's Atonement and Nick Hornby's About a Boy, acclaimed author Joyce Maynard weaves a beautiful, poignant tale of love, sex, adolescence, and devastating treachery as seen through the eyes of a young teenage boy - and the man he later becomes - looking back at an unexpected encounter that begins one single, long, hot, life-altering weekend.
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Good story but anti clamatic
- By Nana on 11-25-13
By: Joyce Maynard
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Fault Lines
- A Novel
- By: Emily Itami
- Narrated by: Lydia Wilson
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
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Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children, and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry.
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Confused by the choice of narrator
- By Bri T. on 02-13-22
By: Emily Itami
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One True Thing
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Christina Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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A young woman sits in jail, accused of the mercy killing of her dying mother. She didn't do it, but she thinks she knows who did. In the last months of her life, Ellen Gulden's mother revealed startling secrets that challenged everything Ellen believed about her family. Now, in jail, Ellen believes those secrets will tell her who had the courage to end her mother's suffering.
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Quindlen's writing skills shine in One True Thing.
- By Bonny on 08-26-13
By: Anna Quindlen
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The perfect memoir
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tedious boring trite
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DNF because of intolerable narrator
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If I Had Your Face
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If I Had Your Face is a riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, South Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania. Together, their stories tell a gripping tale at once unfamiliar and unmistakably universal, in which their tentative friendships may turn out to be the thing that ultimately saves them.
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incredibly enlightening
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Antkind
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B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider - a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made, a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur 90 years to complete, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed.
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A wild ride, a fever dream, a social satire
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Tokyo Ueno Station
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo.
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Goods story, great translation, poor narration
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What listeners say about Luster
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Heydoof
- 10-15-20
Top 5, easily
This book is now in my top five, read or listened to, and it easily earned that spot.
After the first chapter or so, this book felt like an update to Jay McInerney's Bright Lights Big City, featuring a millennial protagonist with millennial problems. A young person in the city trying to have a good time, find themself, and not destroy their soul in the process. As I progressed further into the book, the story felt more like the TV shows Fleabag or Insecure. But by the end, I realized that it has no comparison. It is its own thing, and though it gets real dark and real weird at times, its an amazing journey.
The writing is electric and the narrator perfectly compliments Leilani's writing style.There are a couple of points in the story that seem if not aimless maybe not the best choice, but the writing and narration keep you engaged. Really, I mean if Raven Leilani wrote the owners manuel to my dish washer and Ariel Blake read it I would listen to it, because they'd figure out how to put some gems in there and keep me listening.
As soon as this book hits paperback I'll be buying a physical copy. Excellent, 5/5, I'll be enjoying this again soon.
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4 people found this helpful
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- PDXGEMINI
- 08-24-20
Superb!
Amazing story and writing!! Leaves you wanting more. Hope to see another one by this author soon.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-17-22
Unapologetic
This book made me sink in and really rethink my life as a 20 something. Vulnerable and uncomfortable at times, there were moments I could relate and moments that also opened my eyes to the inside views of what it’s like to be a black female, and alone, just trying to get by.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amber Cate
- 01-23-23
Kind of a throwaway, but entertaining
I thought this book would be more serious based on the description, but it was more lightheaded than I expected. Good story, good narration, but I wasn’t blown out of the water. Worth the money though, and appreciate supporting Black authors.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Ana
- 06-09-23
Just a lot of yearning
This story takes you into all of the less fun parts about being young. The hard stuff and the background simmer of existential crisis that sets in when you slowly but surely start acknowledging adult responsibility.
Not what I was expecting, but still pretty good.
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- karen norman
- 08-10-20
Poetry
Intense, dramatic, raw, visual, current. Highly recommended. You might miss some references but just pause and look them up.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Jami
- 04-19-21
Just okay for me
I thought I would love this based on the hype, but unfortunately I did not. The writing is good (hence the 3 star rating instead of 2) but I couldn’t make myself care about the plot or characters. I probably wouldn’t have finished d felt it was short and I kept hoping something would grab me.
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- Marshmallow Lover
- 01-24-22
Started good but fizzed out
It started out excellent but then I got bored and couldn’t wait for it to be over. The beginning felt fresh and exciting, and I enjoyed it being written in the first person, until it felt like all she was doing was complaining. And complaining. And complaining. Then it became tiresome, more of the same, and I ended up just finishing up the book even though I grew tired of listening to it. The first half of the book was really great- the second half was blah.
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- Sugabear10
- 12-25-20
Excellent story. I listened to it in one night.
Well written and well narrated! I enjoyed every moment!!! I hope there will be more novels to come in the future.
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- C. K.
- 09-08-20
Raw and Relatable
Raven Leilani is a fantastic writer with bold imagery and moving story. She captures the angst and insecurity of a 23 year old woman and layers beautifully the extra challenges of being 23 and black in the same body. Heartbreaking and tragic but I can't stop pulling for the protagonist and it also feels a bit triumphant. She beautifully captures how grey the world is in a very realistic and relatable way that leaves you breathless how the same events can be both ordinary and extraordinary.
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