Photograph: Bryan Dozier/REX/Shutterstock ‘The last four years have been catastrophic’: demonstrators outside the White House, Washington, in November. Instead Leilani brings the two women together “to create a kind of unstable and combustible union, which was really fun to write”. Rebecca, a medical pathologist who wields garden secateurs like her bone cutter, could have been a stock vengeful scorned wife. In a narrative of shifting power, Edie ends up moving into the family home while Eric is away, borrowing Rebecca’s clothes and befriending their adopted daughter, Akila, the only black kid in the neighbourhood. But Edie has been recruited to sex-up a suburban couple’s open marriage, in which the rules have been laid down by Eric’s wife, Rebecca. “The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed, at our desks during working hours, bathed in blue computer light,” it begins. Edie, a 23-year-old publishing assistant, is having an affair with fortysomething Eric (who sweetly corrects her online typos). Written in a high-voltage register, the novel takes gleeful delight in subverting literary expectations. Luster confronts racism, sexism and capitalism in a feverish blast of sex, smart observations and fury that owes as much to TV hits Girlsand Fleabag as to acclaimed literary contemporaries Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh. “Am I allowed to curse?” Leilani asks politely. Her brother died of a rare neuro-degenerative disease in September. In April, she lost her father to coronavirus.

But while finally having her book “out in the world” has been “incredible and surreal”, it has also been a very difficult year. Like Edie, the artist protagonist of Luster, the author, now 30, had spent many years “doggedly practising her craft”, writing in betweenwhatever nine-to-five job she was doing to pay the rent, all the while updating a spreadsheet of rejection letters. The novel has been “received in a way that I honestly couldn’t even hope for”, Leilani says from her Brooklyn apartment. Its publication in the UK this month has been heralded with interviews in glossy magazines, including Vogue. When it was published in the US a year later, last summer, it went straight on to the New York Times bestseller list and was given an admiring debut review in the New Yorker. A couple of months before graduating from New York University’s MFA fiction programme, Raven Leilani was in Zadie Smith’s class when she got a text from her agent saying that an offer had been made on her first novel, Luster.

Raven leilani luster