Memorial

(Hardback, Main)

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Description

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese-American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've 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 in Texas for a visit, 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. 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. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realising he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love.

Reviews

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 Garth 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 Were 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 *

Author Bio

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 National 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