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.
From the Publisher
ASIN : B0DQJ6LQ4B
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Accessibility : Learn more
Publication date : November 4, 2025
Language : English
File size : 48.6 MB
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 337 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-0374609085
Page Flip : Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #14,108 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store) #6 in LGBTQ+ Family Life Fiction (Books) #17 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Kindle Store) #29 in Humorous Literary Fiction
Customer Reviews: 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars (34) var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when(‘A’, ‘ready’).execute(function(A) { if (dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction !== true) { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative( ‘acrLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault”: true }, function (event) { if (window.ue) { ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when(‘A’, ‘cf’).execute(function(A) { A.declarative(‘acrStarsLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault” : true }, function(event){ if(window.ue) { ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } }); });