“I think of how keenly I’ve been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”
If you loved Luster by Raven Leilani, you’re probably still thinking about its sharp voice, messy relationships, and the way it captures the chaos of modern adulthood with uncomfortable honesty. That blend of dark humour, emotional vulnerability, and literary fiction edge is precisely what makes readers search for more books like Luster. Here at What We Reading, we’re pulling together our favourite books featuring flawed but compelling female protagonists, complicated relationships, and explorations of identity, intimacy, and self-destruction. These are novels that sit firmly in the world of contemporary literary fiction like Luster, where nothing is neatly resolved, and characters often feel painfully real. Whether you’re looking for books about messy millennial women, modern dating and relationships, or literary works with strong voice-driven storytelling, recommendations will give you your next read after Luster.
Luster Summary
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 headfirst into Eric’s home and family. Razor-sharp and provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young today.
Queenie – Candice Carty-Williams
Kicking off our list of the best books like Luster is Candice Carty-Williams’ bestseller, Queenie. Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle-class peers. After a messy break-up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places… including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.
As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing?” Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?” – all of the questions today’s women must face in a world trying to answer for them.
Check Out The Best Diverse Books Like Queenie
Sweetbitter – Stephanie Danler
Newly arrived in New York City, twenty-two-year-old Tess lands a job as a “backwaiter” at a celebrated downtown Manhattan restaurant. What follows is the story of her education: in champagne and cocaine, love and lust, dive bars and fine dining rooms, as she learns to navigate the chaotic, enchanting, punishing life she has chosen.
As her appetite awakens – for food and wine, but also for knowledge, experience, and belonging – Tess finds herself helplessly drawn into a darkly alluring love triangle. In Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler deftly conjures with heart-stopping accuracy the nonstop and high-adrenaline world of the restaurant industry and evokes the infinite possibilities, the unbearable beauty, and the fragility and brutality of being young in The Big Apple.
Such A Fun Age – Kiley Reid
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living teaching other women how to do the same. So she is stunned when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted whilst caring for her two-year-old, Briar, one evening. The security guard working at the local supermarket accuses Emira of abducting Briar. A small crowd gathers, bystanders film the whole thing, and Emira is left humiliated and furious. Alix sets out to make everything right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and way of Alix’s willingness to help. When the video of her unearths someone from Alix’s own past, both women find themselves hurtling toward being upended about everything they believed they knew about themselves and one another. Similar to Luster, Such a Fun Age is brimming with empathy and social commentary, making it the perfect read if you want another deep dive into the complexities of growing up.
Check Out The Best Books Like Such A Fun Age
Writers & Lovers – Lily King
Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, mouldy room at the side of a garage where she’s been working on a novel for the past six years. At the age of thirty-one, Casey clings to something all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life.
When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey’s fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. Like Luster, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.
Check Out The Best Books Like Writers & Lovers
Acts Of Desperation – Megan Nolan
In the first scene of this provocative novel, similar to Luster, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance, he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to hang onto him and his love at all costs, even if it destroys her.
Part breathless confession, part lucid critique, Acts of Desperation renders a consciousness split between rebellion and confession, between escaping degradation and eroticising it, being loving and being lovable. With unsettling, electric precision, Megan Nolan dissects the nature of fantasy, desire, and power, challenging us to reckon honestly with our own insatiability.
Check Out The Best Books Like Acts Of Desperation
Milk Fed – Melissa Broder
Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management firm. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting – until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.
Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favourite frozen yoghurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam – by her sundaes and her body, her faith and family – and as the two grow closer, Rachel sets out on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.
Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters
Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in NYC, and a job she didn’t hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now, Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.
Ames isn’t happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that choice cost him his relationship with Reese – and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames’ boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she’s pregnant with his baby, Ames wonders if this is the chance he’s been waiting for. Could the three of them raise the baby together, cultivating some form of an unconventional family?
My Sister, The Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite
Another one of the most socially scathing books like Luster comes from Oyinkan Braithwaite in her viral bestseller, My Sister, the Serial Killer. When Korede’s dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what’s expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel, and a strong stomach. This will have been the third boyfriend Ayoola’s dispatched in, quote, self-defence, and the third mess that her lethal little sister has left Korede to clear away.
She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola begins dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede’s long been in love with him, and isn’t prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: yet, to save one would mean sacrificing the other. My Sister, the Serial Killer is a blackly comic novel about how blood is thicker – and more difficult to get out of carpet – than water…
Check Out Our My Sister, The Serial Killer Book Review
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
