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The heartbreaking story of connection and change in a gay relationship over time, Family Meal finds Washington on typically perceptive and compassionate form.
Growing up , TJ was Cam's boy next door. When Cam needed a home, TJ's parents - Mae and Jin - took him in. Their family bakery became Cam's safe place. Until he left, and it wasn't anymore.
Years later, Cam's world is falling apart. The love of his life, Kai, is gone: but his ghost keeps haunting Cam, and won't let go. And Cam's not sure he wants to let go, not sure he's ready. When he has a chance to return to his home town, to work in a gay bar clinging on in a changing city landscape, he takes it. Back in the same place as TJ, they circle each other warily, their banter electric with an undercurrent of betrayal, drawn together despite past and current drama. Family is family. But TJ is no longer the same person Cam left behind; he's had his own struggles. The quiet, low-key, queer kid, the one who stayed home, TJ's not sure how to navigate Cam - utterly cool, completely devastated and self-destructing - crashing back into his world.
When things said - or left unsaid - become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Nourishment has many forms: eating croissants, sitting together at a table with bowls of curry, sharing history, confronting demons, growing flowers, showing up. This 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, and by their necessary presence, create a family.
Publisher: Atlantic Books
ISBN: 9781838954444
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 524 g
Dimensions: 234 x 153 x 22 mm
Edition: Main
MEDIA REVIEWS
Masterful... Washington lays it all out with the control and artistry of a ballet choreographer - New York Times
Bryan Washington speaks for people who have too long been silenced, and the voice he has found for them is defiant, compassionate, decent and profoundly human - Damon Galgut, Times Literary Supplement
A beautiful novel... Sensual, sometimes sad, ultimately hopeful - The Telegraph
A sensual immersion in loss, grief food and sex. Compelling... Deeply felt... Beautiful - Financial Times
Achingly and beautifully etched... Washington has a profound capacity to face the cruelty and pain of contemporary American life while offering his characters - and his readers - space for self-forgiveness, hope and nourishment - Washington Post
One of the best books I've read this year. Truly masterful - Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women
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
Family Meal is everything that Bryan Washington's work has promised so far: a fiercely written, by turns heartbreaking, terrifying and horny gaze on American masculinity, friendship and love, always with a clear sense of place and environment. Its take on grief and desire, of selfishness and generosity, and of the ways in which the Black masc body might be dismantled, or caressed, is sex-positive and thrillingly true-to-life. I found refuge in it, and will always fall hard on anything Washington writes. - Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk
Brimming with food, sex, joy, intimacy, hella specific jokes, and the broken tools that we inherit to save our lives, Family Meal is nourishment. An absolutely gorgeous book. - Mary H.K. Choi, author of Yolk
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I loved this book. Told from multiple viewpoints, it is a book about dysfunction and love, friendship and family, all of which are entwined and interchangeable here. It's poetic and beautiful, raw and real and I... More
“Family Meal”
Cam lost the love of his life when Kai died. His world fell apart so much that he did what many others have done in the past, he retreated back to where he grew up. He is now working in a bar, spending the rest of his... More
“Honest and hard-hitting”
A touching yet brutally honest queer love story, told from three different perspectives. Washington can certainly write sentences that just take your breath away, but then there's a lot of huff and puff in... More
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