Open Water Paperback – April 13, 2021 by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Description

Author: Nelson Caleb Azumah

Brand: Grove Press, Black Cat

Package Dimensions: 14x209x216

Number Of Pages: 160

Release Date: 13-04-2021

Details: Product Description
WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARDA NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35
A stunning first novel about two young Black artists in London falling in and out of love by a new literary virtuoso and finalist for the BBC Short Story Award, twenty-six-year-old writer and photographer Caleb Azumah Nelson
“Open Water is tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought, an exploration of intimacy and vulnerability between two young artists learning to be soft with each other in a world that hardens against Black people.” —Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing
In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control.
Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty.
This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent.
Review
Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Library Journal, Literary Hub, Millions, New Statesman (UK), Guardian (UK), and Harper’s Bazaar Australia
One of Vulture’s “46 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2021”One of Paperback Paris’ “100 Most Anticipated New Books of 2021” One of Guardian (UK)’s “Books to Look Forward to this Year”One of Esquire (UK)’s “21 Books You Should Be Reading in 2021”One of Cosmopolitan (UK)’s “69 new books by Black and POC authors out in 2021”One of Elle (UK)’s “2021 Reading List” One of Vogue (UK)’s “2021’s most dazzling Debut Novels”One of Frieze’s “What to Look Forward to in 2021”One of Stylist (UK)’s “48 Unmissable Books New Books to Read This Year”One of Evening Standard (UK)’s “Best New Books in 2021” One of The Metro (UK)’s “10 Gripping Books to Look out for this Year”One of the New Stateman’s “Most Anticipated Fiction of 2021”
“Only great artists can craft novels from water. Family, grief, Blackness, Frank Ocean, hip-hop, dancing, growing up, breaking up, London, oppression, beef patties, basketball, diasporic trauma — for Caleb Azumah Nelson, it’s all water. . . In this unforgettable debut, Open Water, all streams are connected  . . . Azumah Nelson’s poetic brilliance, his ability to balance the general and the specific, the ambient and the granular, makes for a salient achievement . . . It’s Sally Rooney meets Michaela Coel meets Teju Cole…Whether he’s describing a tense police encounter or lovers intertwined, when he’s great, which is often, his descriptive powers are truly special.” —Gabriel Bump, New York Times
“Centered around a romance between two young Black British artists, the novel’s unnamed second-person narrator bleeds himself dry on the page, expressing his desire and suffering with desperate clarity. . . By externalizing a young Black artist’s interiority, Azumah Nelson succeeds in transforming his ‘you’ into an ‘I,’ compelling us to speak his name loud and clear.” —Ploughshares
“Nelson’s elegant, poetic debut novel, uniquely written in the second person, features two unnamed artistic Black characters living in London: a 20-something photographer and the dancer/student he is drawn to. As they fall in love, their relationship