Family Meal
'This novel will break your heart twice over'
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of Memorial, a novel that will 'break your heart twice over, with sadness, sure, but more unexpectedly, with joy.' Rumaan Alam
Growing up , TJ was Cam's boy next door. When Cam needed a home, TJ's parents - Mae and Jin - took him in. Their family bakery became Cam's safe place. Until he left, and it wasn't anymore.
Years later, Cam's world is falling apart. The love of his life, Kai, is gone: but his ghost keeps haunting Cam, and won't let go. And Cam's not sure he wants to let go, not sure he's ready. When he has a chance to return to his home town, to work in a gay bar clinging on in a changing city landscape, he takes it. Back in the same place as TJ, they circle each other warily, their banter electric with an undercurrent of betrayal, drawn together despite past and current drama. Family is family. But TJ is no longer the same person Cam left behind; he's had his own struggles. The quiet, low-key, queer kid, the one who stayed home, TJ's not sure how to navigate Cam - utterly cool, completely devastated and self-destructing - crashing back into his world.
When things said - or left unsaid - become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Nourishment has many forms: eating croissants, sitting together at a table with bowls of curry, sharing history, confronting demons, growing flowers, showing up. This is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love, and by their necessary presence, create a family.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A fantastic story will always impress, even when related by the inexperienced, but it’s Bryan Washington’s technical finesse that makes Family Meal such a gut-punching read. The novel opens in Atlanta, where Cam has returned after moving to California, in an attempt to rebuild his life after the death of his boyfriend Kai. In the bar where he now works, Cam encounters TJ, a childhood friend with whom he has had a strained relationship—the details of which are conveyed piecemeal through these central figures, each of whom takes up the narrative from their own points of view as events unfold. Washington’s voicing of his characters is as lyrical and beautiful as it is casual and conversational, delivering thoughtful observations, wry asides and clenched-jaw reflections on reality with a poeticism that reads naturally. Cam, Kai and TJ flit between the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, what is known and what is assumed, in seeming non-sequiturs that more often than not end in crushing heaviness or icy realisation, alleviated by the matter-of-fact intimacy in which these new fragments of information are revealed. Washington’s talent for colouring in just the right amount of context at the right time to add tints and shades to this portrayal of a world within the world parallels the real life ways we come to know new people we meet. The reader’s growing relationship with (and empathy for) the lead characters can’t help but feel genuine. Despite the harrowing themes—grief, trauma, addiction, self-harm—Family Meal, like the motifs of food, friendship and small, struggling communities coming together in times of need, makes for an unexpectedly warm read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Washington's tender, melancholic latest (following Memorial) explores the complicated nature of grief and love. Cam, mourning the death of his lover Kai, is back in Houston after spending time in rehab, but he's still struggling with addiction and an eating disorder. When the bar he's working at closes, Cam accepts childhood friend TJ's job offer at his family bakery. Between his visions of the deceased Kai and attempts to ease his pain with random hookups, Cam's despair is palpable: he feels he is "suffocating from the weight of myself." At the narrative's midpoint, the perspective shifts first to Kai's flashbacks, then to TJ, who observes that Cam's grief and psychological work in rehab have transformed him into "a weed in the concrete that finally found wiggle room." TJ's parallel story is equally consuming, as he navigates his secret relationship with Ian and his budding romance with Noel, a new employee at the bakery. When Noel asks TJ to cook a meal for their family, the two begin a tentative relationship that forces TJ to question what he really wants. Washington brings his tough but fragile characters to life with quietly powerful prose, as when TJ reflects, "I didn't want to be accepted or tolerated. I wanted to just be." Readers will be deeply moved.
