Raven Leilani's Luster is one hell of a debut novel. Her style of prose is so brutally visceral, voluble and effusive, yet the sentences are so precise. The specificity is astounding, even in those fleeting moments in everyday life so easy to glaze over.

The candour of her calamitous key protagonist is endearing from the off. Edie is a young black woman who aspires to make art – earnestly so, as Leilani has said – but is constantly teetering on the precipice of failure. She struggles to make ends meet and clings on to her cockroach-infested apartment. Edie also has a knack for self-sabotage. After losing her demeaning job in a publishing company, she joins the gig economy and lands headfirst in a customer's cheesecake.

Meanwhile, she seeks affirmation and intimacy through her borderline violent affair with an older married man – Eric the archivist. To further complicate matters, Edie then becomes tangled up in his family under the same roof, tiptoeing around wife Rebecca, who may or may not be accepting of her open marriage, and their adopted black daughter Akila. It is these relationships that are most interesting to Leilani as she told The Believer. "It's the women she encounters who treat her seriously and who challenge her in such a way where there is less room for performance, and more room is made to inhabit herself authentically…"

Luster probes desire and despair at the intersection of capitalism, racism and sexism. A key part of the book's thrill is how Leilani gives Edie room to seek power and agency in her questionable choices, even if it means her own annihilation. To lean into her rage. When you feel so inhibited and restricted, numbed by the need for performance as protection, what matters most is to be able to bite down on the marrow of life and really feel something.

And to do it without moral hang-ups: you will rarely read the word "should" in relation to Edie's motives and actions. Not that this spares others from her ascerbic judgment. Here are Edie’s first thoughts on Rebecca. "I try to reconcile the woman I have imagined with the woman before me, but there is too much data, and too many of my assumptions have quietly become absolutes. I make amendments reluctantly, surprised by the beauty of her feet. Otherwise, she is exceedingly regular, everything about her so nondescript as to almost be sinister, the halo of dirty blond hair around her sun-battered face, her boyish lean, the invisible segue of thigh into calf, and the general feeling that if she took her clothes off, her body would be as smooth and as featureless as silt."

The relentlessness of her raging subconsciousness can be unsettling – you fear for her – but it does offer hilarious moments aplenty. Like this innocuous encounter in a restaurant. "A waitress wearing a ten-gallon hat tosses a couple of sticky menus on the table. She tells us the specials in such a way that we know our sole responsibility as patrons in her section is to just go right ahead and fuck ourselves."

The author is also brilliant at exposing the flecks of humanity in uncomfortable situations. Take this awkward moment where Edie joins Rebecca on the mat for a yoga session. "Rebecca makes room but does not look at me. We enter corpse pose, and as we lie side by side, I hear her short, irregular breaths and understand the degree of her effort. It feels personal. That finite oxygen, the smell of yeast and salt, deodorant and shampoo, the body when it is most conspicuously an organism, a thing that can weep and degrade.”

Leilani has the ability to stop you in your tracks with a phrase you can’t help ruminating over. There is a fascinating moment where Edie accompanies the family to Comicon and Akila is so happy after this day out that she gives her a proper hug. It comes so out of the blue, the last thing Edie would expect from her lover’s daughter, who has been somewhere on the scale between indifferent and antagonistic since they became housemates.

“A reaper emerges from the crowd with glossy, black wings, and Akila takes off her headset and runs dizzily over. She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.” (Leilani attempts to unpack that last thought during this conversation with writer Hanif Abdurraqib.)

My undisputed favourite passage from the book is this intense frisson between Edie and Eric. Sex on the page rarely cuts to the messy core of the matter – and I don’t just mean the potential for anti-climax – nor does it adequately convey the jeopardy of carnal acts. What makes this two-page 'scene' even more sensational is that it's one sentence. The editor in me didn't blink an eye.

"Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany and Eric is talkative and filthy but there is some derangement to his face, this pink contortion that introduces the whites of his eyes in a way that makes me afraid he might say something we cannot recover from just yet, so I cover his mouth and say shut up, shut the fuck up, which is more aggressive than I would normally be at this point but it gets the job done and in general if you need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch though I feel panicked all of a sudden to have not used a condom and I am looking round the room and there is a bathroom attached, and in the bathroom are what look to be extra towels and that makes me so emotional that he pauses and in one instant a concerned host rises out of his violent sexual mania, slowing the proceedings into the dangerous territory of eye contact and lips and tongue where mistakes get made and you forget that everything eventually dies…"

Her powers of satirical observation, astringent commentary and unfiltered introspection will have you savouring every line.

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NB Tessa Thompson’s production company Viva Maude will be adapting the book with Leilani for HBO. I can see this working really well in episodic form but let’s wait to see who is cast.