{ "item_title" : "Palaver", "item_author" : [" Bryan Washington "], "item_description" : "Finalist for the National Book Award for FictionWinner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for FictionA 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 Reviews' Best Fiction of 2025One of The Washington Post's Best Fiction Books of the YearNamed 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 & CountryA 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.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/37/460/907/0374609071_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.00", "online_price" : "28.00", "our_price" : "28.00", "club_price" : "28.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "28.00" } }

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Bryan Washington is one of the most sensual and emotionally captivating writers out there. His sparse yet resplendent Memorial and Family Meal, put this style to use in stirring plots with dual narrators where both sides of heartbreak and betrayal were explored. Family Meal is notable in particular for its unabashed sexuality and use of food as an analogue for connection; Washington can grab your heart and your hips, making you hot and hungry all at once. His fourth book, Palaver, extends his streak. This novel follows a mother and son attempting to reconcile in Tokyo, where the son has moved to escape their past. The narrative travels across time and space, including their painful period together in Houston and the mother’s immigration from Jamaica to Canada. Rather than separating the two perspectives into obverse sides of the book, as Washington did in Memorial and Family Meal, the points of view are integrated here in a third-person narration that encompasses both characters’ interior lives, sometimes shifting from mother to son between sentences. That means the whole emotional picture is captured in every scene: We understand why these two have grown estranged and we feel the ache of every word that passes between them. As each explores new relationships, they find their hearts growing more capable, more open and ready to accept change. Like in all Washington’s work, this novel’s arc is one of healing, lingering on the messiness of life but never getting stuck in it. Washington masterfully delineates the process of forgiveness—not an easy or painless evolution but an intense effort to understand someone who has hurt you. Another vital and inventive element of Palaver is its use of images. In past work, Washington incorporated photographs in only a select few places to underscore a feeling. Here, they appear at the end of almost every chapter, but their prevalence doesn’t detract from their potency. Naturally, it’s almost impossible to put the effect of the pictures into words, but somehow they manage to capture the emotion of the preceding text, releasing each chapter’s tension with a gut punch and providing a moment to stop and feel it. With Palaver, Washington has again proven himself to be a genius of feeling, a writer who resuscitates our hearts with every word.