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Memorial
Bryan Washington
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Description for Memorial
Paperback.
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
'This feels like a vision for the 21st-century novel... It made me happy'
Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Benson and Mike are two young guys who have been together for a few years - good years - but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives for a ... Read morevisit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past, while back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted...
Funny and profound, Memorial is about family in all its strange forms, becoming who you're supposed to be and the outer limits of love.
NAMED A BOOK TO WATCH IN 2021 BY:
SUNDAY TIMES | THE TIMES | DAILY MAIL | THE TELEGRAPH | RADIO 4 | IRISH TIMES
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Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Bryan Washington
Bryan Washington is a writer from Houston. His fiction and essays have appeared in, among other publications, the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the BBC, Vulture and the Paris Review. He's also a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 winner, the recipient of an Ernest J. Gaines Award, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize finalist, a ... Read moreNational Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize finalist, the recipient of an O. Henry Award and the winner of the 2020 International Dylan Thomas Prize. BryWashing.com / @BryWashing Show Less
Reviews for Memorial
A tender, wistful, often profound story about a deteriorating romance between two twentysomething men... Lo-fi and intimate
Sunday Times
Funny and moving... Memorial confirms Washington as a writer not just to watch, but to read now
The Times
A masterclass in empathy... Washington transforms revelations into cliff-hangers, like Elena Ferrante. He writes layered sex scenes, like ... Read moreGarth Greenwell
Guardian
A tender and moving story about the ties that bind us to those we love, sometimes against our better judgment or our strongest will
The Telegraph
Washington is a technically dazzling writer
Alan Hollinghurst, New York Review of Books
A triumph
Paul Bailey, Literary Review
Dazzling... With crackling dialogue and gimlet-eyed humour, Washington paints a vivid, poignant portrait of how love, romantic and familial, is weathered and ultimately deepened by time
Esquire
A fresh, vibrant love story that interweaves race, queerness, nationality, family, and intimacy with narrative ease
Vogue
Brilliantly details the smallest moments that mean the absolute most, the heartbreakingly human limitations of how we love one another
Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age
Memorial casts a fresh take on the American family that becomes truer because of its disparate origins, the queerness of its genesis, and the buoyed wonder it finds in surviving grief and loss towards the rare and forgiving ground of difficult, hard-won love.
Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
A tour de force, truly unlike anything I've read before. Bryan Washington's take on love, family, and responsibility is as complicated and true as life itself. I can't stop thinking about it.
Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto
Stunning. Everything happening in Memorial is so intimate, sensual, and wise. I love this book.
Tommy Orange, author of There There
A true page-turner. I was entranced.
Jacqueline Woodson, author of Another Brooklyn
Made me think about the nature of love, and family, and anger, and grief, and love again.
Jasmine Guillory, author of The Proposal
Bryan Washington is an expert in illuminating the way we love. It is a beautiful heartbreak.
Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk
It is about everything that matters in life.
Katie Kitamura, author of A Separation
Wryly funny, gently devastating
Entertainment Weekly
A beautiful, unusual examination of the difference between love and care, and what happens when they merge
Washington Post
This book is so poignant and beautiful, asking questions about what it means to live a life and what it means to love
LitHub
Implicit in a book about changing relationships and titled Memorial is the question of what is being preserved. The book preserves Houston and Osaka. It preserves the feeling of being young and lost. It preserves the food that gives us comfort and nourishment and purpose.
The New York Times
Wonderfully irreverent and heart-meltingly tender
Oprah Magazine
A very different kind of love story... Washington's deeply touching (and deeply funny) look at love, sex, family, grief, and the ways in which we take care of each other is a revelation, a reminder of how powerful a novel can be
Refinery29
Bryan Washington writes some of contemporary fiction's most tender stories... Queer love, family dynamics, Houston settings, and cooking... the young writer has brilliantly united them all in his new novel
New York Observer
Big-hearted and moving
Harper's Bazaar
Bryan Washington writes quiet. His characters methodically chop cabbage, or slide silently from room to room. Then, bam. A quick, elliptical conversation will smack you sideways with its heft and resonance.
Vulture
This sensitive novel illustrates the deeply individual ways we search for a sense of home.
RealSimple
This intimate story is about the families we are born into and the families we choose for ourselves... a quiet, sensual exploration of how we decide who we stick around for.
Mashable
Not only an exploration of a kaleidoscopically diverse America... but a moving portrait of two young men who are figuring out exactly who they are in this world. Anyone who enjoyed Washington's dreamlike yet textured meditations on life in Houston in Lot will be enchanted with Memorial.
The Millions
At once a love story, a tale of self-actualization, and an ode to family in every sense of the word.
Popsugar
Washington creates two men so real it feels like even though the book ended, they will keep on living and figuring it out and making mistakes and falling down and getting back up again.
Alma
With wit and humor, Washington tackles race, class, identity and queerness... In a story about first loves and family, both men will change as they discover their own truths.
Parade
At once fresh and new and daring, while also feeling wholly familiar
The Advocate
A love story so multifaceted and emotionally nuanced as to feel transformative
Seattle Times
Bryan Washington writes some of contemporary fiction's most tender stories. . . . Queer love, family dynamics, Houston settings, and cooking . . . . the young writer has brilliantly united them all in his new novel.
New York Observer
[Washington's] ability with writing the sensual pleasures of making and eating food is a good way of understanding his ability as a novelist to write about the human mind. It's such a beautiful book . . . a pure pleasure.
Rumaan Alam, The Maris Review
Extraordinary. . . . Washington writes with ease, like a juggler who is adding in new objects all the time, except the book ends with everything aloft instead of in hand. . . . It can be difficult to share your life with someone; Washington somehow explains this anew. Memorial, on the other hand, is easy to share.
The Paris Review
I really loved this book. It's tender and touching
David Nicholls
Brilliant
Evie Wyld
Set between Houston, Texas, and the Japanese city of Osaka, this is a tender, wistful, often profound story about a deteriorating romance between two twentysomething men. It deepens themes from Washington's short stories: the meaning of community, the power of food to bring people together and the impact of absent fathers.
Sunday Times
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