i would say this was an unexpectedly lovely read. i can be very picky with literary fiction, and the realisation that the author doesn't use quotation marks in dialogue was a little intimidating at first, but it only took a few pages to get me fully invested into the story. the main subject of the book (the relationship between the mother and the son) was explored deeply and emotionally, without shying away from the uncomfortable bits of their past or the awkwardness of the present. the flashbacks were integral in fleshing out the characters and i really enjoyed them, even though at first i occasionally lost track of all the side characters. the lack of quotation makrs was surprisingly not a problem? very rarely did i find myself reading back to figure out who was speaking, which was an unexpected but great turn of events and shows good attention to detail. i highlighted quite a few quotes from the book, too; i found the writing style very beautiful, and the book overall was well-crafted, clearly with care and love. i would absolutely read more by this author in the future. (also the cover remains one of my favourites ever, big kudos to the designer.)

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

I've read and loved so many of Washington's books. Unfortunately, this novel was a definitive miss. I couldn't bring myself to care.

As always, please make up your own mind about this book. It just wasn't for me, but it could be for you!

WHAT A BOOK!

At first, I felt conflicted about my own moral compass and the son's secret. But as the story went far ahead, I tried to be more open and slowly understood that variety of people have their own ways to live their lives. This book, is exactly that.

I don't want to hate the mother, but I could see where she came from. As the story dove deeper, I didn't really care about the mother's past until she finally showed her emotion for her brother. She could've saved her own sons if she just... knew how to accept her brother. But she kept that trauma for a while, enough to drive her son away, which was the reason I hated her. But I don't hate her as much anymore. She was a decent mother. She just needed to process everything with more time.

The pacing of this book was quite alright. It wasn't so bad, the shifting between the povs & pasts could be a little bit confusing but it was pretty interesting! Naming the character "the son" and "the mother" was pretty smart because with all the characters with different names made it easier to remember the main characters. Also, the photography between the texts are beautiful!

Thank you for this book Netgalley! Also the writer, Bryan Washington, thanks for showing me around Tokyo with your book. I teared up a little bit at certain point because it felt a little bit close to home. I didn't know I would love this book. Now that I think about it, I actually love it, haha.

I wasn't new to Bryan Washington with 'Palaver' and this novel did feel like a change of pace, albeit with some recognisable concerns and themes from previous work. This is the kind of narrative where a lot gets left unsaid and the reader is asked to read between the lines. The principal characters are left unnamed and while the detail of the plot is very particular, there is a hint that the intergenerational and intrafamilial conflicts that play out in the past and present of this novel are supposed to be read as being more generalisable. The novel discusses life abroad, in a culture and language that you inhabit rather than possess and, for that, there are echoes of the work of Garth Greenwell.

Poetically written, with a much of the narrative built on subtext and not context, 'Palaver' was a win for me. Leaning more literary, Palaver delivers an exploration between familial relationships between a mother and son. The son lives as an English teacher in Japan, and the mother shows up with all intentions to somehow ground their relationship, despite its past and current conflicts.
An enjoyable read, though I do personally wish that the punctuation was styled differently. Again, I know it's a choice, but I wish 'literary' authors wouldn't shy away from it out of fear of what kind of tone it sets. All punctuation does is help the readers, so I always scratch my head at this.
I wish there had been a bit more explanation of the characters outside of the relationship, as I think too much was off-page for this, as it felt kind of limited as far as fully developing these two individuals.
The cat was a lovely touch.
The cover is absolutely gorgeous.

I don’t seem to be able to access this book. None of the options work. Usually I can read titles on my Kindle but not with this one, nor the download, nor the app. Help. I really want to read it.

A son living in Tokyo has built a life far from his estranged family in Houston, escaping into the city’s neon nights and the comfort of a chosen family.

Palaver - Bryan Washington
⭐⭐⭐⭐

This book is for you if you enjoy:
-Unspoken sorrow
-Reconciliation
-family
-Hope

As the days pass, small moments begin to chip away at their defenses, a quiet conversation, an unexpected connection, the pull of something that feels like hope.
Washington is a heartfelt, quietly humorous novel that weaves through time and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan exploring love, family, and connections.

This is an absolutely gorgeous novel that's paired with Tokyo street photography that I understand is also the author's. You have the small explosion of a mother showing up unexpectedly in the foreign country where her son works intending to stay with him and talk about some of the things that caused him to leave the country and home, all while the son is working as an English tutor and working through his affair with a married man who is about to have a child. This takes space over a few weeks in their lives and focuses on them individually and their relationship with the other, and does incredibly well with that feeling of wrestling good intentions against the harm you actually did, and attempting repair. Comes out this fall, and highly recommended read when it does. (I also have a new vocab word thanks to the title!)

This is an unwrapping of what went awry with the mother and the son and the common threads that might possibly bind them. I think this is an interesting premise to almost autopsy a relationship at a point in time and then pull and shape and morph the twisted parts as we go. This is my first book by the author so there are a few things that threw me off from being fully immersed in the story.
There are no quotation marks for the dialogues (this might be an arc thing so I’m not sure if this is how it’ll be published) but I’m not sure what the purpose of that is. It made it difficult to pull out of inner dialogue and descriptors into voiced narratives. The other is the abrupt beginning which only contextualised where you as a reader are with no introduction at all to characters to begin being invested in. The third is the transitions between past and present are difficult to navigate. I also found that this intimate look into something so personal was devoid of any personalisation - no names, just the mother and the son are what the protagonists are referrred to throughout the book creating a divide and distance I did not enjoy - it was almost like all they were was in relation to each other and had no identity beyond that - this felt even more true when it came to their interactions with other characters who only seemed to come in and out for no discernible purpose - I had no interest in the love interest for eg of a generalised “the son”.

A mother flies from Houston to Tokyo to visit her estranged son. The son does not welcome her visit. Forced into close proximity for the first time in years, both mother and son must wrestle with memories of what delivered them to this point and figure out where they will choose to go next.

Ever since reading Bryan Washington’s short story ‘Hatagaya Lore’ and the accompanying interview in The New Yorker, ‘Palaver’ has been on my most anticipated books of the year list, so I was thrilled to finally get the chance to read it.

And it did not disappoint.

This novel is beautifully written. Subtle and heartfelt and stunning. I found myself both wanting to race through it and wanting to linger on every sentence so that it never finished. I think having visited Japan and having such fond memories of the country deepened my experience of the novel, as I was immediately transported back to Tokyo and found myself reliving my time there while witnessing the city through the characters’ perspectives. Understanding the few Japanese phrases used in the book helped, too—perhaps if I’d needed to pause to look them up it would have broken the spell.

Beyond the setting and the atmosphere, I love the way the story moves so deftly between past and present, revealing more and more of the mother’s and son’s histories and why they act the way they do and how their relationship has come to be so strained. They feel so real—uniquely damaged and flawed and human. To me, this book is an honest portrayal of the complexity of relationships, of family, of acceptance, and of life in general.

Character is definitely the central focus of this novel, so it is best suited to readers looking for a book that is more about people than plot. I think an appreciation of Japan and the Japanese culture is a helpful starting point, too. Readers should also be prepared for the more literary elements, like referring to the protagonists as ‘the mother’ and ‘the son’ rather than by name, and the eschewing of speech marks. These elements didn’t bother me, and I feel that they add to the story, but they may be off-putting for some readers.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Bryan Washington and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC. My review will be posted on Instagram, Amazon UK, Goodreads and The StoryGraph near or on the publication date.

A sparsely written novel about the things unsaid. An American man living in Japan is unexpectedly visited by his mother. Over the course of a few days they begin to reconnect.

At first glance a simple story that offers much to be analyzed. Most of the important events that shaped the lives of the man and his mother are only hinted at, never directly talked about. Even the names of the two main characters are only referred to as the son and the mother. Told through vignettes the reader is offered a slice of life look into a queer relationship and community in Japan.

Palaver is a quick read that almost begs to be read again after finishing to piece together the insinuations of what happened. I have a feeling a lot of people will rave about this book when it comes out but for me as a resident of Japan and Tokyo for the last 16 years I couldn’t connect with it much. The Tokyo and Japan in this novel are truly works of fiction. As much as the author claims to love Japan it seems like they may never have lived there nor talked to any of its residents. The descriptions in the book are those of a tourist. There are many aspects totally missing or overlooked. While Japan is a peaceful country there remains a shocking amount of xenophobia. The main character works as a freelance tutor, yet with its strict rules of visas and immigration this could never happen. The character wanders through Ni-Chome the gay district wandering into a small hole in the wall bar, again most of these places discriminate against outsiders, refusing entrance to them often. At times it feels like the tokyo in the novel is a fetishized one, even food like croquette is spelled using its romaji name despite already being a foreign loan word. At times I had to wonder if the lack of description wasn’t on purpose but instead a lack of understanding.

I’ve enjoyed Washington’s past works and to some extent his newest novel. The writing is at times beautiful and I found myself thinking about it after finishing but mostly on the things it got wrong. I’m sure most people will enjoy it but know that it’s about as accurate of a description of Tokyo and queer life in Tokyo as Lost in Translation.

Thanks to the publisher FSG and NetGalley for providing a free digital copy for review.

I almost DNF. But I stuck it out until the end. It was a short read. The main characters are Mom and Son which took me awhile to get used to. It tells of their struggles to maintain a relationship and how they manage to start to reconcile. The story shifts between their POVS too much that sometimes you will fell lost. I think it was the writing style for me that made the rating so low. No quotations, too many side characters to keep up with and the ones that were interesting didn't have much to say. While not much dialogue, i get the raw emotions of wanting to forgive, to move on, and be accepted. But it just didn't do it for me.

The true star of this book is Washington's descriptions of the scenery. He paints a detailed and beautiful picture of where the characters are throughout the book. However, I felt that the characters themselves were not as elaborately constructed and remained opaque to me. My lasting impression is a visual one rather than an emotional one.

This book is beautiful. Simply put. This is about love and loss and misunderstanding and relationships and family. It is about hope and trying again. It is just a wonderful human experience specifically of two people you will never know the names of, yet you know them well. I didn't want this book to end!!

BEAUTIFULLY written work about family and love and trying one's best, even if (or especially if) one's best isn't enough. I've been a fan of Washington since his lovely novel Memorial, but this may have supplanted that as my favorite. Made me want to call my own mom, which isn't an easy feat.

There is something very comforting and life-affirming about Washington's new novel which ponders the meaning of home, belonging and connection: Crafted around an estranged, nameless mother-son duo, the author shows a variety of constellations people have chosen and nurtured to function as their community or family - the term "work in progress" features again and again in the text. The gay son has fled the homophobia of his family, leaving his widowed Jamaican mother and incarcerated brother in Texas and making a new home in Tokyo's queer community, where he falls in love with a married man. He and his friends with different social and ethnic backgrounds regularly meet in a bar run by a trans man, forming a diverse, supportive network. Then, the mother travels to Tokyo to re-connect with her son...

This novel is hardly about the plot, or rather: The plot is nothing but a slow reveal of what actually happened between mother and son back in Texas, and how both of them strike new, surprising connections in Tokyo, where the foreign becomes familiar and then beloved. Washington defies categories like heteronormativity, monogamy, ageism, cultural difference, the binary, or traditional ideas of marriage and family, and his position is convincing not because he is making a logical argument, no: As this is fiction, he just shows what love and friendship can look like. You read it and you think: Yes, of course, what idiot would question that? (Many idiots do still question it, of course, which renders such novels politically relevant.)

But yes, the whole Houston / Tokyo connection is pretty close to his last novel, Memorial, and the way the text goes through different constellations also has something of going through the motions, showcasing example after example. The effect is that the story sometimes comes to a halt and in parts feels a little forced, although overall, the construction of the mosaic with side characters and flash backs is well exercised. The mother is not fully plausible, considering what she went through, but the character of the son is stellar, lively and psychologically convincing.

Now I'm really curious what Washington will do next, because it really can't remain on familiar territory anymore. He needs to switch it up, and I believe that he absolutely has it in him. I'll certainly be reading it.

Bryan Washington always beautifully tackles complex relationships in his novels and does so again in Palaver.
In Palaver, we meet a mother who has a fractious relationship with her son and hasn't seen him in 10 years. After receiving a disturbing phone call from him, she flies to Tokyo, where he had been living. During her visit, the mother slowly begins to build a relationship both with her son and also with a local cafe owner.
Mr. Washington's writing style in this novel was interesting and may not be for everyone: Son and Mother are never given names, the story moves quickly back and forth between the past and the present, and there are no quotation marks.
These elements weren't a deterrent for me and I loved the cast of the mother and son's biological and chosen families in the US and Japan. Backstories involving the mother's brother, her older son and other characters are eventually fleshed out by the end of the book.
In several respects, Japan (and Tokyo in particular), was another character in the book. We get a wonderful sense of life in the city for the regular residents and not the typical tourist perspective. This character is further amplified by the photographs included in between chapters.
Thanks to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the opportunity to read Palaver. I received a complimentary copy of the book and opinions expressed are completely my own.

Palaver by Bryan Washington is a thoughtful, emotionally rich book that left me with mixed but ultimately appreciative feelings. The strongest aspect of the novel is its character work—despite the brevity, the people in this story feel deeply real and intimately familiar. Washington excels at capturing complex, conflicting emotions and layering them through subtext, allowing the reader to feel the weight of past experiences without having every detail spelled out. It’s a subtle, poetic approach that suits the tone of the book beautifully.

That said, the plot felt vague and, at times, elusive. While the ambiguity occasionally served the emotional landscape and themes, I often found myself wanting more concrete context and clarity. The lack of explicit detail made it harder to fully connect with the narrative arc, even though I remained invested in the characters themselves. Palaver is one of those books that’s both easy to admire and a little frustrating—it lingers in your mind, not always comfortably, but certainly with purpose.

For starters, Washington is one of my favorite authors and when I heard his new book PALAVER was coming out. I ran to NetGalley and requested it immediately. This new novel is very much like his past with deep complex characters, character, narratives, and a plot that is a slow burn- and typically is also more emotional based. I’m a little conflicted with this one because I loved the LGBTQ representation and of course it being set in. Tokyo was very alluring. However, I found the MC highly unlikable, and while I understood he had a troubled past it still didn’t justify his interactions with people, or even why people liked him so much? I’m not sure if I missed something, but I never really got why he was so upset with his mother to begin with, sure she had chosen to focus on his brother who had been in the military and was having mental health issues, but I never really got the big Aha moment. This novel also felt like a different side of the same square if that makes sense. Stylistically similar to his previous work, it again included a biracial couple, and it was set in the same background as his previous novels- almost like I had read this one in the past, and I kept feeling like it was a continuation of a previous story, although it was not.

Immersive in its scenery, and deep with its emotionality- I still had a good time spending time walking the streets of Tokyo with both the son and the mother- even if it felt like we had walked these streets before.

Out 11/4/25, thank you @netgalley for the arc and the publisher! X

Very scattered review of Palaver by Brian Washington.

This book had many aspects I liked and only a few that I didn’t.

— The realness of the story.
The black and white photos in between the chapters — some blurry, and all of them giving the reader the sense that they are on the streets of Tokyo, with the son and the mother, visiting the places they’ve gone and seeing the things they’re seeing as they walk around.
The descriptions of the environment involving many senses — the music that is playing, the wind fluttering the son’s shirt, the people around them, some taking selfies and some clutching their child’s hand.
The mentioning of the names of the places they visit, the districts they walk to, and the stations they use to get there.
All of these things made me feel like I was reading something out of real life. Even though the summary of the book doesn’t mention anything about autobiographical elements, at first I felt like I was reading the story of the author himself, especially knowing the author was also going back and forth between Houston and Tokyo. The namelessness of the main characters didn’t bother me, but it didn’t help with the feeling that I was reading an autobiographical story. Questions like “Did the author really do that?” or “Am I reading about the author’s mother and their relationship?” or “Is this about them?” popped in my brain while reading the first few chapters of the book. It took me out of the story and makes me feel like I’m reading someone’s journal without their permission — which is a silly feeling to get from reading a book. I wanted to read the story as a singular item, but the nature of the story being so personal made me feel reluctant to get lost in it at first.
Anyway, it’s totally a me problem, and after a while — somewhere around the 30% mark — that feeling just went away, and the mother and the son became their own characters, with their names simply being “the son” and “the mother.” After that, I loved how real the story felt, how invested I became in reading about these two.

— The writing style. I will be reading other books from Brian Washington. His writing was captivating with beautiful prose sprinkled here and there. It wasn’t hard to follow most of the time even if there weren’t any quotation marks, and the flow between the son and the mother, the past and the present was very smooth. I really liked the words I was reading, the pacing, and the back-and-forth. I never got bored and always wanted to know what will happen in the next paragraph. I believe it is not easy to have a balance when telling a story such as this with multiple timelines and not lose the reader’s interest.

— The subtlety? I don’t like when books have too many things to handle in too few pages. This book is not that long and we see so many different issues. BUT the book handles them very well. I wasn’t expecting the subtlety and delicacy in each chapter. We read about characters with so many problems and struggles, yet they still come across as real people on the page — not just prototypes of the hardships they face. They continue living in their own way, with their complex lives. The messages or advice the characters offer to help and support each other don’t feel forced or didactic. It all feels real, and I think that’s hard to achieve in a book with so many layers of complexity.

— Details. When I say subtlety, I meant mostly the details that is spread all around the story. I think I would have liked the story more if I read it in couple of days, so that I could have catch these details more. The story doesn’t hold your hand and say ‘hey, I mentioned this beforehand, did you catch it?’ And I believe the beauty of this story lays in these little details.

— Community. AHHHHHH this story is ultimately very hopeful and uplifting.

— Other aspects I liked such as: Reading about the mother having her own journey. She wasn’t just a mother, but a person with her own story and life and struggles.
It was fun to get to know Tokyo through mother's eyes, and visit well-acquainted places with the son.
Walking around Tokyo made me want to visit there.

— Other aspects I didn’t like such as: I would have liked to read more about the son and his brother.

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC!