Firstly, as we know, Washington is a fantastic writer. His books deserve all the accolades in the world. Luckily for us, this book was no different.

'Family Meal’ is a smart, honest, and raw book about love and grief and the family we chose. Life and living. As with all of Washington’s books this is a real testament to human connection and the fragility of emotion. I love the way that he writes, his books always tell us so much about life, put simply and beautifully and gritty. Its unapologetic. It’s great.
I apologise to the publishers for it taking me so long to review this!!!

This is the second novel I have read from Bryan Washington . i have raved so many times about my love for his work and this novel is no exception.. We follow Cam after he moves back to his hometown into his quasi adoptive family who consist of his best friend and their parents growing up because he lost his own parents. He moves to Houston because he just lost his partner in a horrific attack of violence.He's living with the grief of losing that and all of the memories that are recurring back in the bedroom he shared with is best friend that he had a deep crush on.He's now a queer man in his mid 20's processing what that means, what unrequited love looks like now and rejecting the people around him that try to protect him.

Much like Memorial, this book has so many beautiful scenes of family meals, food, collective gathering around which I think he does well.This book is so beautiful, so moving, so poignant without being too cloying or earnest. Washington has a real way of depicting people and their struggles and their trauma without being too overwhelming. You can sense how protective he is of his characters and you close the book still thinking of them.

This is a great, sexy, hopeful and heart-breaking book about gay love and modern life. Washington is an extraordinary prose stylist and I loved this novel.

This book is a beautiful of addiction and redemption, where we watch a central character fail repeatedly, constantly trying to find his way out of the various challenges he finds himself in, but struggling not to repeat the destructive patterns he is used to.

I found the book to be incredibly affecting and clever in its portrayals of both complex issues but the nuances of how people interact with each other when that is all happening. Incredibly tender and thoughtful.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A truly beautiful book about grief, queerness, community, friendship, family and love. One of my favourite books of 2023.

it seems washington is one of those authors whose books i want to love but in reality, i do not. i liked the premise of this one but the style, especially when it comes to the dialogues and the character's inner thoughts, strike me as clunky, and not in a realistic way but in a rather laboured manner. the moments of tension were particularly unconvincing and just came across as poorly delivered lines. the arguments felt contrived as if acted out by a bunch of very green theatre students. the novel wants to be realistic and unfiltered in its portrayal of depression, grief, and addiction, but these things are depicted in an almost gimmicky way. not quite sensationalistic but in an annoyingly rooney-esque way (affected edginess). here the narrative feels particularly disjointed due to the novel's structure, which falls prey to the overused switch in perspective. there were moments where i perceived something close to nuance, but these quieter moments are lost in (over)dramatic sequences where we watch our mc going down the well-trodden path of a self-destructive 'messy' protagonist.
anyway, those are my thoughts about family meal. if this novel happens to be on your radar i recommend you check out other readers takes on it.

I adored this difficult, realistic and gritty view of mental health, grief, food, queerness and found family. Bryan Washington is a master of his craft - I’d recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand how difficult it is to survive something unsurvivable.

Read it! One of my favourites this year. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher!

I thoroughly enjoyed this, it was a great exploration of family, found family, love and loss. The different perspectives from TJ, Cam and Kai as they shared their stories were a great way to structure the novel and I also loved how significant food was to their relationships. A great read!
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this advanced copy.

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 between.

I just felt a constant disconnect from the characters, which left me slightly frustrated and unable to fully appreciate the story. With 'Memorial' and now this, Bryan Washington is fast becoming one to watch, and I will definitely be seeking out his next book. Somewhere between 4 and 4.5 stars.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

After the verve of his linked short stories (Lot, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize) and the offbeat tenderness of his debut novel, Memorial, I couldn’t wait for Bryan Washington’s next book. While it’s set in the multicultural Houston of his first book and similarly peopled by young queer men of colour, Family Meal shares the more melancholy edge of Memorial with its focus on bereavement and the habits and relationships that help the characters to cope.

Cam has moved back to Houston from Los Angeles after the untimely death of his boyfriend Kai, who had a budding career as a translator and spent part of each year in Japan. Cam works in a failing gay bar, crashes with his boss and has mostly stopped eating. Although he still loves cooking Asian food for others, he rarely tastes it himself; his overpowering appetite now is for pills and sex, leading him to arrange as many as four hook-ups per day. Kai still appears and communicates to him. “Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai.” Is it to escape this spectre, or the memory of what happened to Kai, that Cam descends into his addictions? Meanwhile, his estranged friend TJ, with whom Cam grew up at TJ’s Korean American family’s bakery after the death of Cam’s parents, has his own history of loss and unhealthy relationships. But a connection with the bakery’s new nonbinary employee, Noel, seems like it might be different.

If you’ve read Washington before, you’ll know what to expect: no speech marks, obscenity-strewn dialogue, sexually explicit scenes that seem to be there for the sake of it (because sex is part of life, rather than because they particularly advance the plot). An issue I had here, like with Memorial, is that having multiple first-person narrators doesn’t add anything; Kai and TJ sound so much like Cam, who narrates roughly the first half, that it’s hard to tell their affectless accounts apart. Such interchangeable voices two books running suggests to me that Washington hasn’t yet managed to fully imagine himself outside of his own personality.

The novel has much to convey about found family, food as nurture, and how we try to fill the emptiness in our lives with things that aren’t good for us. However, it often delivers these messages through what wise secondary characters say, which struck me as unsubtle.
“You don’t have to do this alone, says TJ.”

(Kai:) “My mother would say, Cooking is care. The act is the care.”

“Love can be a lot of things though, says Noel. Right? It’s pleasure but it’s also washing the dishes and sorting medication and folding the laundry. It’s picking out what to eat for dinner three nights in a row, even if you don’t want to. And it’s knowing when to speak up, and when to stay quiet, and when, I think, to move on. But also when to fight for it.”

“Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other, she [Kai’s sister] says. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t.”

There’s no doubting how heartfelt this story is. It brought tears to my eyes at the beginning and end, but in between did not captivate me as much as I hoped. While intermittently poignant on the subject of bereavement, it is so mired in the characters’ unhealthy coping mechanisms that it becomes painful to read.

In my mind Washington and Brandon Taylor are in the same basket, though that may be reductive or unimaginative of me (young, gay Black authors from the American South who have published three books and tend to return to the same themes and settings). Before this year I would have said Taylor had the edge, but The Late Americans was so disappointingly similar to his previous work that Washington has taken the lead. I just hope that with his next work he challenges himself instead of coasting along in the groove he’s created thus far.

My first read of Bryan Washington and I thought it was a solid, heartfelt story.

The novel was about grief, love and found family. It is told from three POVs: Cam, Kai and TJ. Our understanding of how they are linked develops as Washington reveals more about their pasts. The slow filling out of the story was a real highlight.

For me, the story did become a little one note at times and the secondary characters were a bit unsubtle.

I think I would recommend picking this book up in hard copy rather than kindle. Washington utilities the short, sharp chapter as an emotional punch, the impact of this is lessened on e-reader.

Overall, would recommend.

Pick this book up if: you’re looking for a short dose of heartache

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I wasn't familiar with Washington's work previously and read this on the strength of the strong advance notices - it wasn't quite at that level for me but it was an enjoyable read. Not hugely plot driven but it features some compelling characters, although the psychology of them wasn't explored in as much detail as I'd have liked. I liked the shifting perspectives, although I personally found it a little frustrating that the main character recedes a little as a result. I couldn't be more different from the characters here (and I'm sure the book will find a huge audience in its own community) but there was still lots to appreciate. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This is a great exploration of grief and reconnecting with your roots. Bryan Washington has a way with words - his characters always feel so real, and his writing never fails to impress me.

That being said, I think I connected more with the story in his debut, and something about the structuring didn't work for me, which is strange because normally I'm a huge fan of multiple POVs.

overall still a good read, definitely worth checking out!

I think this might be my book of the year.
It's the kind of novel I had to hold to my chest after I read the final line.

A story of friendship, love, grief and survival told in three parts, Family Meal takes us into the lives of Cam and TJ and Cam's lost love, Kai. We follow them as they explore snippets of their lives, with tragedy, sexuality, gender, racism, homophobia and mental health all intwined.

There's a lot of sexual exploration in this novel but none of it is ill-placed or timed. It's confused and desperate, searching for connection in the difficulties that these characters experience.

Family Meal is a beautiful story of connection, found family, failures, love and hope. Bryan Washington writes in a beautifully melancholic way that makes my chest ache and I love him for it.

Thank you Netgalley and Atlantic for the ARC.

A complex and emotionally charged novel, not easy to review because I could rate it in a different way tomorrow as it's impact emotions in a very strong way.
Friendship, grief, loss, and two impressive MC.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

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 time living it large - you really don't need me to spell out what that means and I'll have my review rejected if I try! Basically he has lost the will to live and really doesn't care much about himself. His only joy is when Kai "visits" him. And then, one day, he reconnects with TJ, an old friend whose family he pretty much lived with as a child growing up. The rest of the book deals with Cam and TJ as they rediscover and figure out how to help each other.
Once I had got used to the way this book is written - there are no speech marks - which really didn't take me long as it's not my first rodeo with this stuff, I simply devoured this book. It is definitely one that requires access to tissues as it is so much all the feels. But not in a twee way. It's brutal and graphic and pulls no punches as it hard hits along the way.
It's a story about love, but of many kinds of love. Specifically about family. But it's also about grief and how it also can be brutal. And truth and admission. It's hard to explain without spoiling things and the way the author writes, so poetic and often lyrical, I'd be a fool to even try.
It's very character driven, mostly by dialogue, which means that the characters have to be on the top of their game and they most definitely are. So much so that I connected easily to them and was very sad to have to say goodbye when I finished the book.
This is my first book by this author and I have the feeling it won't be my last! My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

A moving story about the friendship between TJ and Cam. Cam was taken in by TJ's family, Mae and Jin, when his parents died, and was brought up in their Houston bakery.
As adults, Cam returns to Houston following the death of his partner, Kai. TJ wants to support Cam, but he is spiralling into increasingly self-destructive behaviour. The story takes us through this period, circling back to past events so everything makes sense.
There's a lovely cast of characters in the bakery, and the supportive friends and family are all well-written and individual. It illustrates the importance of family, food, friendship and love.
Beautifully written. Recommended.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Family Meal
by Bryan Washington

A story of love, friendship and survival in the face of adversity. The central figures are Cam and TJ, childhood friends who become brothers almost, but also explore their sexuality through each other.

Told in three parts we peal back the layers to uncover their falling away and coming back to each other, through family tragedy, coming out, racial and mixed race aggressions, homophobia and a lot of bad luck.

There is a lot of promiscuity in this book, and while it doesn't make me shirk from reading it, it makes me sad for the confusion and desperation for connection that these characters experience.

This is about finding those connections, building on them, and creating family where family doesn't exist, or has failed.

I love Mae, TJs mother, for her strength and her reliability in both these guys' lives. It's a reflection on my own life stage that she is the one I am most interested in. I think if I was a younger reader I probably would find more to connect to in this story, I'm not the target audience, far from it, but I believe that this author speaks directly to the generation he's writing for.

Publication date: 12th October 2023
With thanks to #netgalley and #atlanticbooks for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review

#bookreview #irishbookstagram #familymeal #bryanwashington #literaryfiction #lbgqt

I’ve read quite a lot of historical fiction recently so it felt refreshing to be plunged into Bryan Washington’s contemporary Texas. This is the third work of his I’ve read (one of the few authors I’m up to date with). His collection of short stories “Lot” (2019) I found powerful and brutal and I rated his first novel “Memorial” (2021) five stars finding it less spiky which provoked a real emotional response from me. This second novel feels closer to the stories in “Lot”.
Bryan Washington likes to explore family dynamics in the modern world; that’s both biological and the people you’d choose to be family, those that stick by and support. As a gay black man who has his 30th birthday this month his characters are unsurprisingly diverse in terms of race, culture and sexual identity. There are three main characters here who each provide first-person narratives. Cam is a mess, he’s returned back to the Houston area following the death of his partner and is getting by through casual pick-ups and an eating disorder. As a teenager Cam stayed with his friend TJ’s parents and TJ gets back in touch and is the second narrator. The third is Kai, the dead boyfriend whose ghost Cam sees. Cam attempts to get his life together as TJ begins to question his and despite the prickliness of their relationship they do what they can to support each other.
We begin with Cam which feels a little brave as he is so closed off to the world that his narrative is difficult to relate to but this pays off when TJ takes over as we gain a real understanding of what Cam has gone through and the strength of the bonds between these two as they work in TJ’s family’s bakers. There’s a lot of talk which means progress through this book is quite quick.
After three works set in the same location there are echoes of a modern take of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales Of The City” but here with a strong urban Black American feel and with Houston and its residents taking the place of San Francisco. What the two authors have in common is real heart which means here throughout the questionable behaviours, the characters’ indifference to all the gay sex they seek out, the complexities of their past and present and the difficulty of negotiating the modern world there’s a surprising positivity which remains with the reader. I did find this more in “Memorial” but it is certainly also here in a novel which will continue to enhance this author’s reputation.
Family Meal is published by Atlantic Books on 12th October 2023. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

I have read Bryan Washington's previous two books and this one was easily my favourite. Cam & TJ grew up together & when Cam's parent's die in a car accident TJ's family takes him in. he works at their bakery but he desperately wants to move &. leave Houston behind him. which he does. until years later, when his boyfriend Kai dies and he finds himself back in the city.

on the surface this is a novel about sex and food. it is very, very heavy on both. but neither of these things can be separated from grief, from longing, from tragedy. we get three perspectives here - Cam, Kai and TJ but most heavily focussed on Cam & TJ. their relationship has been strained for a few years and with Cam back home they hesitantly find their way back to each other.

I really enjoyed spending time with this one, the characterisations felt so vivid, even down to the side characters. would thoroughly recommend.