Family Meal

Author: Bryan Washington

ISBN: 9780593421093

Tags: Gay, Literary Fiction, POC and Queer, Black and Queer, New Releases

“Tender and poignant, Washington’s latest hits the spot.” – PEOPLE Magazine

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss.

Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai’s ghost won’t leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ’s family bakery. TJ’s not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said – and left unsaid – to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?

When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.

“What makes Washington’s writing about family so refreshing and complex is how he shows the ways people attempt to demonstrate the emotions they otherwise have trouble expressing to the ones they hold dear…. Family Meal juggles a lot — Cam and TJ are both dealing with their present situations and with the phantoms of opportunities ignored and hard choices enacted — but Washington lays it all out with the control and artistry of a ballet choreographer. Each story line gives the other strength.” —New York Times Book Review

“For anyone who’s read Washington’s multiple-award-winning first novel, Memorial, you know he has a knack for measured storytelling that builds momentum and gradually fills in holes before culminating in a finale that washes over you like a giant torrent of meaning and consequences that leave you gasping for air (in a good way)…. Washington’s other gift is creating viscerally vulnerable characters and allowing their refreshingly open conversations to flow, showing just how hard — but ultimately rewarding — facing difficult issues head-on can be…. Ultimately, the power of Family Meal is that it shows us how to hold space for each other, through life’s highest highs and lowest lows.” —San Francisco Chronicle