Palaver by Bryan Washington

Palaver by Bryan Washington

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction

"A heart-wrenchingly honest, often luminescent exploration of how to find and cultivate true connections, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places . . . [Palaver is] an unshakable triumph." --The Washington Post

One of Time's Must-Read Books of 2025 and Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction of 2025
One of The Washington Post's Best Fiction Books of the Year
Named a Most Anticipated Book by The New York Times, New York, Time, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, People, Harper's Bazaar, Bustle, and Town & Country

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 and drinks 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 mother in Houston, 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 last saw each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.

With only the son's cat, Taro, to mediate, the two of them bristle at 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 steers them in unexpected directions--the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner and the son to a cautious acquaintance with a new patron of the bar--they begin to see each other more clearly. During meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, mother and son try as best they can to determine where "home" really is--and whether they can even find it in one another.

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 a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree and winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He received the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award for his first book, Lot, which was also a finalist for the NBCC's John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Bon Appétit, and GQ, among other publications. He lives in Houston.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374609078
ISBN 10	0374609071
Title	Palaver
Author	Bryan Washington
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Year published	2025-11-04
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.