Open Water

"Nelson’s debut novel is a contemporary love story set in London. When two unnamed twenty-somethings, a photographer and a dancer, lock eyes from across a crowded room, they find themselves irresistibly drawn to one another. Their subsequent relationship—intimate but undefinable—and artistic collaboration forms the basis of this intense and lyrical novel, which also serves as a meditation on the making of art and the experience of being young and Black in modern Britain . In some ways, it occupies similar ground to Sally Rooney’s Normal People , so if you snapped up Beautiful World, Where Are You the moment it came out, this is likely a book for you. Nelson takes some bold literary decisions—it’s written in the second person, and in a very distinctive, dramatic register—which I suspect may be divisive, but altogether this is an impressive, tender and deeply moving dissection of an intoxicating love affair."