Palaver
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- 20,99 €
Publisher Description
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
Named a Most Anticipated Book by New York, Time, the Boston Globe, 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.
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.
"André Santana's narration matches the somber tone of this novel...[and he] tackles the Jamaican, Japanese, Texan, and Spanish accents and phrases of the many globe-trotting characters." — AudioFile
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This novel feels like a hug. One of those redemptive hugs that comes after a difficult but necessary conversation. Our unnamed protagonist is a Texas expat living in Tokyo who finds his Jamaican mother unexpectedly at his door, 10 years after they last spoke. He’s built a new life as an English tutor, bolstered by the found family he’s nurtured at a neighbourhood gay bar (which includes a complicated relationship with a married man). She’s still reckoning with her own tumultuous life as an immigrant in Houston and the losses she’s suffered. Their awkward, emotionally raw—and often very funny—conversations find them undertaking the quiet, complicated work of trying to understand each other. Palaver is not the most dramatic, plot-driven novel, but mother and son’s flawed yet sincere attempts at connection as they share meals and play with his cat feel deeply empathic. André Santana’s narration is tender and assured, a perfect tonal match to this gentle story of forgiveness and rebuilding.
