Palaver

A modern literary romcom and a life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.

'Such a joy' Ocean Vuong
'It'll break and remake your heart' Andrew Sean Greer
'A gorgeous book' RO Kwon

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 America, particularly his mother, whose preference for the son's troubled homophobic brother 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, 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.

About the Author

Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the novels Memorial and Family Meal. A National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree, he is the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and an O. Henry Prize, and he has been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence, and the James Tait Black Prize.

A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, his writing has also appeared in Granta, The New York Times Magazine, Time, GQ, and Esquire, among many other places. He is based in Tokyo.