Staff Pick
Bryan Washington's Lot and Memorial were two of my favorite queer fiction books of the past five years. I've also loved the food writing Washington's done. Family Meal combines his interests by telling the story of two queer friends examining their history and figuring out their future, while working side by side at a family bakery. Recommended By Adam P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Washington's tender, melancholic latest (following Memorial) explores the complicated nature of grief and love....Washington brings his tough but fragile characters to life with quietly powerful prose." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
"Food, family, and sex drive this intimate novel about the difficult search for true connections....Washington brilliantly commits to his style and preoccupations in a novel about the often winding journey to family." Kirkus (Starred Review)
Review
"Family Meal is filled with love — for the sensual pleasure of life, the places that we call home, the beauty of the people around us. This novel will break your heart twice over, with sadness, sure, but more unexpectedly, with joy. It takes a generous writer to show us the world in this way, and Bryan Washington is one of our best." Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
About the Author
Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the bestselling novel Memorial. He is also the winner of a 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, a Lambda Literary Award, and an O. Henry Prize, and was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize finalist, 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. He divides his time between Houston and Osaka.