Palaver: A Novel [Hardcover]

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
Winner of theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize for Fiction

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

One ofTimes Must-Read Books of 2025 andKirkus Reviews Best Fictionof2025
One ofThe Washington Posts Best Fiction Books of the Year
Named a Most Anticipated Book byThe New York Times,New York,Time,The Boston Globe, theLos Angeles Times,Rolling Stone,People,Harpers Bazaar,Bustle, andTown & 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. Hes 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 sons 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 sons 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 directionsthe mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner and the son to a cautious acquaintance with a new patron of the barthey begin to see each other more clearly. During meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, mother and son try as beslÓ'