Did Not Finish

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.

Call It What You Want is a nostalgic ode to all ‘almost love’ stories—the ones with no label, no title but an undeniable intensity. Call it what you want, was it love? Sloane Hart is a hopeless romantic who always believed her great love story was out there, until her parents’ divorce shattered that dream. She swears off dating and is determined to graduate college, become a writer and move to New York City. Until she meets Ethan. Ethan Brady is guarded and mysterious, unwilling to talk about his past or let anyone get too close. As they start dating without labels, they both know it can’t last forever. Sloane imagines a future with Ethan but he can’t give her the commitment she needs. Will she be able to convince Ethan to take a chance on it? Or will she have to learn the hard way that some things just aren’t meant to be? Sloane and Ethan’s story is a bittersweet tale of love and self-discovery that explores the complexities of relationships and the challenges of moving on.