Palaver
A Novel
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the National Book Award 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' Best of Fiction 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.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Washington revisits the Japanese setting of his novel Memorial with a bighearted drama about a 30-something Houston man's reunion with his estranged mother. At the outset, the unnamed protagonist, known only as "the son," gets an unexpected visit from his mother in Tokyo, where he's spent the past 12 years teaching English. She's curious to know more about his life, but they struggle to connect beyond small talk, and the son remains embittered at her failure to support him when he came out as gay many years earlier. Meanwhile, the son grapples with his feelings for the married man he's been seeing and another man he's recently met, who might be a better match. During a sightseeing trip with his mother, the pair finally put it all on the table, but struggle to find resolution: she misses him and wants him to come back to Texas with her, but he insists Japan is his home now, as he's built a tight circle of friends in Tokyo. The situation is rather straightforward, but Washington's nuanced portrait of the gulf between mother and son and their difficulties bridging it offers keen insights into human relationships, showing "how people change through others" as they "try to figure out what works for us." The author's fans will love this.
