I read Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson over Christmas and was captivated by its spare and lyrically-beautiful writing and the way it deals so sensitively with some very difficult issues.

The protagonist is a young black man living in south-east London who has fallen beautifully in love with a woman who is awkwardly going out with one of his friends when he meets her. Immediately it is clear they are soulmates, bonding over their shared experiences of being at private schools where they were always different, and, amongst other things, their mutual love of Zadie Smith, who they each found at just the right time, delighting in finding a writer who was describing their world.

The visceral texture of the fried chicken and the heat of a London summer rises from the page, as does the monotony of daily life waiting to see each other again. The slow build up of their relationship is perfectly paced, as friends ask ‘Are you two a thing now?’. The author captures what it feels like to talk to someone who completely understands you and who you completely understand, the joy and peace of being seen and the need for it to last forever. The swimming out into the open water of the title to say ‘I love you’.

But there is a darker side. The racism of being made to feel you ‘don’t belong here’, the physical exhaustion of grief and the aftermath of trauma. The protagonist’s inability to taint the woman he loves with the murder he witnesses by sharing the experience and its impact with her is heartbreaking, as he deliberately pushes her away even when she begs him to stop hiding from her when he stops returning her calls. Finding out what it takes to break unconditional love. The novel left me with a deep-seated feeling of loss and some small insight into what it is to experience grief, trauma, loss and the everyday cuts of racism. A hard read but a beautiful and important one, that I am extremely glad to have experienced.