Palaver A Novel

Bryan Washington, André Santana

eAudio - 2025

Finalist for the National Book Award for FictionNamed a Most Anticipated Book by New York, Time, the Boston Globe, 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... more