Dave's Book Blog: "Open Water" by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Friday, 6 March 2026

"Open Water" by Caleb Azumah Nelson

This extraordinary debut novel, written in the 2nd person, present tense, about the experiences of a young black man in present-day south London, garnered many awards when it was first published in 2021 including winning the Costa debut novel award, the Betty Trask award, and the Somerset Maugham award, being shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize and the Dylan Thomas prize. It was named one of the top ten debut novels of the year by the Observer and one of the best novels of the year by TIME.

It chronicles a love between the unnamed protagonist ("you") and his equally unnamed girlfriend, the anonymity and the second person narration plunging the reader into deep empathetic identification with the characters.

The prose is lyrical and poetic. The author frequently uses repetition to bludgeon the reader into acceptance of his ideas, thus:

"You think about what it means to desire your best friend in this way. You think about holding onto this feeling for so long, holding it down, holding it in, because sometimes it's easier to hide in your own darkness than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light. You think about whether she has been doing the same. You think about spillage, and whether this is something that can be mopped up. You think as you walk through the night ..." (Ch 13)
"It's summer now, and you're looking forward to worrying less. You're looking forward to longer nights and shorter days. You're looking forward to gathering in back gardens and watching meat sputter on an open barbecue. You're looking forward to laughing so hard your chest hurts and you feel light-headed. You're looking forward to the safety in pleasure. You're looking forward to forgetting, albeit briefly, the existential dread which plagues you, which tightens your chest, which pains your left side. You're looking forward to forgetting that, leaving the house, you might not return intact. You're looking forward to freedom, even if it is short, even if it might not last." (Ch 14)

But there are also many phrases that recur like leitmotifs, separated bu pages, even chapters, but popping up time and time again. These repetitions, like a heartbeat, like a drum keeping a rhythm in the background, reminded me of the style of At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, another book about the black experience but in a very different context.

The book refers to Zadie Smith's NW, a story about black character in north London. The experiences and feeling of doomed black youth strongly reminded me of Poor by Caleb Femi, a book of poetry gathered from the experiences of black youths in London.

The novel provides a visceral description of what it is like to be a talented (he's hugely artistic, immersed in music and paintings and theatre and literature and photography) young black man in London. Many of his experiences resonated: I, too, have been in situations he describes and have shared these emotions, but I haven't had the relentless exposure to jeopardy day in day out that creates an existential dread, a foreboding of inevitable doom. Mostly, I felt like an outsider. But it was a privilege and an education to gain a glimpse or two of his reality.

And the prose!

Selected quotes:

"There should be no shame in knowing what one wants." (Prologue)
"You lost your god so you can't even pray, and anyway, prayer is just confessing one's desire and it's not that you don't know what you want, it's that you don't know what to do about it." (Ch 7)
"There are really only two plot devices when writing: a stranger comes to town, or a person goes on a journey." (Ch 9)
"The intense mess of being intimate with another." (Ch 10)
"You look like you got hit by a bus, and you dusted yourself off, and did it again for the hell of it." (Ch 11)
"To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression." (Ch 12)
"You want to find yourself in a basement, neck loose, bobbing your head as a group of musicians play, not because they should, but because they must." (Ch 14)
"You ... pushed apologies towards her in the way one would do when diffusing a bomb in the movies: one eye closed, snip at the wire and hope for the best." (Ch 15)
"You're like a pair of musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic structure of a double bass the inert grace she had been blessed with, moving her body in ways which astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music." (Ch 17)
"You're scared that she might not just see your beauty, but your ugly too." (Ch 18)
"He had spent a life so close to death that it was less a life lived and more one survived." (Ch 25)
"You gaze in the mirror and you see that you are not a coward but you have done a cowardly thing and that you're not malicious but you have hurt her and you're not an embarrassment but you are ashamed." (Ch 26)
"Freedom is really the distance between hunter and prey." (Ch 27)