Black Buck

Darren is a twenty-two-year-old Black man living with his mother in Bed-Stuy, content managing a Manhattan Starbucks with no plans to leave. Then Rhett Daniels, the charismatic white founder of a buzzy sales startup called Sumwun, spots him talking a customer into a pricier drink and recruits him on the spot. Darren becomes the only person of color in a brutal, cultish sales program, is remade as "Buck," and climbs fast while losing his neighborhood, his girlfriend, and his sense of who he is. The novel is framed as a how-to guide Buck writes for other people of color trying to break into industries that were never built for them.