Join us for a special conversation with author Bryan Washington for his new novel Family Meal. In conversation with writer Nicole Chung, Bryan will explore his new novel about friendship and loss.
Books will be available for purchase and signing from Loyalty Bookstores, and a limited number of giveaway copies will be available courtesy of the DC Public Library Foundation.
About the book:
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.
About the author:
Bryan Washington is a writer from Houston. He’s also a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 winner, a New York Public Library Young Lions Award recipient, an Ernest J. Gaines Award recipient, an International Dylan Thomas Prize recipient, a Lambda Literary Award recipient, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction award, the James Tait Black Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize finalist, a National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize finalist, the recipient of an O. Henry Award, and was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30. He is a columnist for the New York Times Magazine.
About the moderator:
Nicole Chung is the author of A Living Remedy and All You Can Ever Know. A Living Remedy was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and has already been named a Best Book of 2023 by Time, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, USA Today, Esquire, and Booklist, among others. Chung’s 2018 debut, the national bestseller All You Can Ever Know, landed on over twenty Best of the Year lists and has been translated into several languages. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and NAIBA Book of the Year, a semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and an Indies Choice Honor Book.
Nicole is currently a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a Time contributor, and a Slate columnist, and her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, The Guardian, GQ, and Vulture. Previously, she was digital editorial director at the independent publisher Catapult, where she helped lead its magazine to two National Magazine Awards; before that, she was the managing editor of The Toast and an editor at Hyphen magazine. In 2021, she was named to the Good Morning America AAPI Inspiration List honoring those “making Asian American history right now.” Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now lives in the Washington, DC area.
