Set over the course of three summers, this novel follows Stephen, a first-generation Londoner born to Ghanaian immigrant parents. On the cusp of big life changes, Stephen feels pressured to follow a certain track - a university degree, a move out of home - but when he decides instead to follow his first love, music, his world and family fracture in ways he didn't foresee
"Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. 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 - trying to make their mark in a city 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. At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water 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, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years."--Publisher