Palaver: A Novel

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize 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 Reviews’ Best Fiction of 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.

Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the novels Memorial and Family Meal. A National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree, he is the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and an O. Henry Prize, and he has been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence, and the James Tait Black Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, his writing has also appeared in Granta, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Time, GQ, and Esquire, among many other places. He is based in Tokyo.

“The dialogue between the son and mother, for all the pain it circles, is delightfully funny and blunt, with an underlying warmth they try and fail to keep buried . . . A novel of compressed grace, showing the interplay of the past and the present in elegantly suggestive ellipses, hopeful about the possibility of pain being relieved through mutual recognition, through ‘palaver.’”
―Luke Brown, Financial Times

“[Palaver illuminates] ways we can make ourselves whole again.”
―The Washington Post (Best Fiction of the Year)

“Bryan Washington is, in my opinion, one of the best fiction writers out there. [His novels] are all so perfectly tuned into the emotions, interiorities, and relationships of their characters that they are a joy to read from start to finish . . . Like all of Washington’s books, [Palaver] is rich with character, place, humor, and love.”
―Sarah Neilson, them

“It’s Washington’s first novel where Houston is more of a ghost than [a] living, breathing thing. It’s a compelling shift . . . As is always the case with Washington, the answer isn’t neat, but Palaver isn’t absent of catharsis. There are lots of moments where the characters catch you off guard with their observations, reminiscent of when a friend randomly says a deeply profound thing while you’re having a totally ordinary conversation. Overall, a welcome return to Washington’s world.”
―Tembe Denton-Hurst, The Cut

“Bryan Washington writes about queer relationships and parent-child tensions like he’s working with a fine-toothed comb. The emotion he manages to convey in a single line of dialogue? Incredible . . . This is a beautiful, beautiful book.”
―Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle (Best of Fall)

“Understated yet potent . . . Washington examines varying experiences of displacement, writing with tenderness about the tolls of emigration and exile, both cultural and familial . . . The text is enhanced by the inclusion of numerous black-and-white photographs of Tokyo.”
―The New Yorker

“[Palaver’s] rhythmic interweaving is quite an achievement; the frequent set changes, rather than disrupting or fracturing the narrative, inculcate a hypnotic desire in the reader to keep looking.”
―Hannah Gold, The New York Times

“This novel feels like a hug. One of those redemptive hugs that comes after a difficult but necessary conversation . . . [The mother and son’s] awkward, emotionally raw―and often very funny―conversations find them undertaking the quiet, complicated work of trying to understand each other.”
―Apple Books (Staff Pick)

“In between deep dives into the past are wonderfully moody, wholly immersive snapshots of the characters’ intersecting present lives, which both propel the narrative forward and contribute to some of its magic . . . 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.”
―Alexis Burling, The Washington Post