Palaver - by Bryan Washington (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The story of a mother and a son, estranged for ten years, reconnecting in the son's chosen city of Tokyo in the weeks leading up to Christmas"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Advance Praise

"It's remarkable how delicately and finely Washington metes out the emotional journeys for both mother and son . . . He's skillful at conveying the ways in which small, even tiny acts of kindness can heal . . . A patient, powerful analysis of the dual devotion required to heal a fractured relationship."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Few writers write about tenderness as Bryan Washington does--unadorned tenderness that is full of heart and humor but steers clear from familiar sentimentalities and convenient solutions. With deep understanding of human relationships, Palaver is a rare novel that offers companionship to solitary readers and lonely souls."
--Yiyun Li, author of Things in Nature Merely Grow

"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 Washington 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 be 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

About the Author

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.