Author- Caleb Azumah Nelson
Series- N/A
Published- 2021
Page Count- 163 pages
Publishing House- Penguin
Genre- literary fiction, modern fiction
Rating- 4/5 stars
About the Author
Caleb Azumah Nelson is a British-Ghanaian writer and photographer. His debut novel, Open Water, won the Costa Book Award for First Novel.
Taken from Wikipedia.
Plot
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.
Taken from Goodreads
Opinions
Open Water is currently the fiction book of the month at work and one I had wanted to read for a while. I had heard a lot of good things about it and rightly so. This book has some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read. I've recently started underlining/annotating my books and I highlighted so many great lines in this book. To think that Caleb Azumah Nelzon is only in his twenties and the potential he has ahead of him is insane. This book won the Costa First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year, which it deserved. If the only thing that you take away from this review, is that it has beautiful writing, then I'm okay with that.
The story was a very interesting one. It was a lot of small threads being pulled together to form this overall story. I'd say the main one was the love story between the main characters, whose names you never actually learn. Then what it's like to be a young, Black artist is another important theme discussed. There's also a lot of racism and how Black people are treated in the UK. For a book that's only 163 pages, it packs a lot in. It very rarely feels like there's too much happening and the story moves at the right pace.
Speaking of the story, the reason I gave it 4/5 stars was because it was predictable that they would break up. It always seems to happen and it would have been nice to see them stay together as a couple. They clearly cared for each other and could have supported him after his traumatic experience with the police. I also wanted to get to the relationship a tiny bit quicker as I'm impatient and that stage of a book is always interesting.
At the end of the version I had, it included the short story Pray, which Caleb Azumah Nelson wrote for the BBC Young Writer's competition. You could really see the growth in his writing from Pray to Open Water. I actually struggled with Pray because the writing style was so different. I can't wait to see what he writes next as he is such a talented young writer. I imagine this will be one of my favourite books of the year.
What did you think of Open Water??
