Open Water

Two young Black British artists meet in a pub in Southeast London: he is a photographer, she is a dancer, and the connection between them is immediate and disarming. Over the course of a year, tenderly and tentatively, they fall in love — learning each other, making art, and trying to be fully seen.

But intimacy asks for a vulnerability that the world outside makes dangerous. As their relationship deepens, it is tested by fear, by the pressures of creative ambition, and above all by the constant, grinding stress of systemic racism and the threat of violence that shadows Black life in the city.

Written in an intimate second person and narrated by an unnamed protagonist, Caleb Azumah Nelson's Open Water is a slim, poetic debut about love, masculinity, art, and race. It won the Costa First Novel Award and announced a striking new literary voice.