Surprise Castle
Palaver

Palaver - Hardcover

$20.99
$28.00
-25%
Quantity
01

Pay over time for orders over $35.00 with

Offers & Perks

Earn 20 points with this purchase

Added to your rewards balance after checkout.

100 points welcome bonus

Create an account and start with extra points.

Join now
Availability:In StockContributor:Bryan WashingtonPublish date:2025-11-04Pages:336
Languages:EnglishPublisher:Farrar, Straus and GirouxISBN-13:9780374609078ISBN-10:374609071UPC:9780374609078Book Category:FictionBook Subcategory:Literary, Family Life, LGBTQ+Size:8.48 x 5.72 x 1.10 inchesWeight:0.99Product ID:SCVD6T3GRM

Long-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction

Named a Most Anticipated Book by New York, Time, the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, TIME, 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.
Languages:EnglishPublisher:Farrar, Straus and GirouxISBN-13:9780374609078ISBN-10:374609071UPC:9780374609078Book Category:FictionBook Subcategory:Literary, Family Life, LGBTQ+Size:8.48 x 5.72 x 1.10 inchesWeight:0.99Product ID:SCVD6T3GRM
Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the novels Memorial and Family Meal. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, he is the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and he has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the James Tait Black Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times food section, his writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, and The Paris Review Daily. Raised in Texas, he lives in Houston and Japan.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Free shipping on orders over $75. Standard shipping takes 3-7 business days. Eligible items may be returned within 30 days of delivery. Conditions apply.