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A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.
In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He's entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in Houston, particularly his mother, whose preference for the son's oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they've last seen each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.
Separated only by the son's cat, Taro, the two of them bristle against each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life begins to steer them in unexpected directions- the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner, and the son to cautiously getting to know a new patron of the bar-the two of them begin to see each other more clearly. Sharing meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, both mother and son try the best they can to define where "home" really is-and whether they can find it even in each other.
Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington's Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others. Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the novels Memorial and Family Meal. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, he is the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and he has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the James Tait Black Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times food section, his writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, and The Paris Review Daily. Raised in Texas, he lives in Houston and Japan.
"Palaver is the pinnacle of what has become Washington's classic approach to writing: care, humor, tenderness, and an embrace of human beings at their most vulnerable, lovely, and wounded. It's such a joy to see the summation of his generosity of thinking and living actualized in the sentence. Fiction-no-life is better because Bryan is writing."
-Ocean Vuong
"Gripping, beautiful, honest, unlike anything else on the bookshelf! A great work by one of America's greatest young writers, Palaver will break and remake your heart. A book I will sending to everyone I know." -Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
"Palaver is an intimate, ambulatory, and deeply human reflection on family and home-on what we choose and what's already chosen for us. It's about our flawed attempts at loving and being loved, forgiving and being forgiven. It's the rare novel that manages to be funny and sad and honest all at once-awake to the mundane miracles of our lives. Bryan Washington is one of a kind." -Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans
In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He's entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in Houston, particularly his mother, whose preference for the son's oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they've last seen each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.
Separated only by the son's cat, Taro, the two of them bristle against each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life begins to steer them in unexpected directions- the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner, and the son to cautiously getting to know a new patron of the bar-the two of them begin to see each other more clearly. Sharing meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, both mother and son try the best they can to define where "home" really is-and whether they can find it even in each other.
Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington's Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others. Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the novels Memorial and Family Meal. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, he is the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and he has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the James Tait Black Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times food section, his writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, and The Paris Review Daily. Raised in Texas, he lives in Houston and Japan.
"Palaver is the pinnacle of what has become Washington's classic approach to writing: care, humor, tenderness, and an embrace of human beings at their most vulnerable, lovely, and wounded. It's such a joy to see the summation of his generosity of thinking and living actualized in the sentence. Fiction-no-life is better because Bryan is writing."
-Ocean Vuong
"Gripping, beautiful, honest, unlike anything else on the bookshelf! A great work by one of America's greatest young writers, Palaver will break and remake your heart. A book I will sending to everyone I know." -Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
"Palaver is an intimate, ambulatory, and deeply human reflection on family and home-on what we choose and what's already chosen for us. It's about our flawed attempts at loving and being loved, forgiving and being forgiven. It's the rare novel that manages to be funny and sad and honest all at once-awake to the mundane miracles of our lives. Bryan Washington is one of a kind." -Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans
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Reviews
"Andr� Santana's narration matches the somber tone of this novel in which a Jamaican mother visits her nearly estranged gay son. Frequent flashbacks to the mother and son's often joyless lives lend insight to their tense exchanges. In the two weeks that follow, the mother works on mending their relationship; at the same time, the son realizes he has more friends than he realized. Santana tackles the Jamaican, Japanese, Texan, and Spanish accents and phrases of the many globe-trotting characters. His flat descriptions of the son's affair with a married man reflect the disengagement of the main character. Black-and-white scene-setting photos between the chapters are lost in the audio version. S.S. � AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine"
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