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Palaver: A Novel Audiobook
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Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
Named a Most Anticipated Book by New York, Time, the Boston Globe, 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.
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.
"André Santana's narration matches the somber tone of this novel...[and he] tackles the Jamaican, Japanese, Texan, and Spanish accents and phrases of the many globe-trotting characters." — AudioFile
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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About Bryan Washington
Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot, the bestselling novel Memorial, and the Lambda Award winner Family Meal. Hehas also won the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, a New York Public Library Young Lions Award, an Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, an International Dylan Thomas Prize, and an O. Henry Prize, and he was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. He is a columnist for the New York Times Magazine and his fiction has appeared in the New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories.
About André Santana
André Santana is an award-winning audiobook narrator on a journey to tell great stories. Operating with a keen sense for realistic delivery, he inevitably becomes a fan of every book he narrates and shares that joy through his performances. As a non-binary and Black narrator, he loves both telling stories that match him and disappearing into new characters across the literary multiverse.