Bristol Gray runs artist careers for a living, and her newest client is Marlon James, the rapper and poet the industry calls Grip. Eight years ago the two spent one intense summer together in Los Angeles before life pulled them apart. Now she is the one steering his rise to superstardom, and the pull between them has not faded.
Bristol keeps people at arm's length, shaped by a childhood watching her mother's marriage fail. Grip never stopped wanting her, even through the years they spent apart. As his fame grows, the two face pressure neither can control. A family and an industry are uneasy about their interracial relationship, and the country treats his success and his safety very differently.
The novel follows their reunion in alternating chapters. It mixes the pull of old feelings with the weight of racial inequality and police violence in America, and it does not soften either subject to keep the romance light.
Grip opens a two-book duet, preceded by the novella Flow and continued in Still. It reads as two people finding out whether love holds up against a world that keeps giving them reasons to doubt it.