Open Water
by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Buy on Amazon"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.…
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"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."
The Best Novels of 2021 · fivebooks.com