Washington's first novel opens in quiet chaos, under crossing flight paths. Ben has just learned that his boyfriend, Mike, is leaving Houston for Osaka to visit his dying father. Meanwhile, Mike's mother (whom Ben hasn't met) will soon arrive at their place for an extended visit from Japan. Ben goes with the strange new flow, working his day-care job, flirting with a potential new love interest, and somewhat reluctantly learning to cook from Mitsuko. Mike voices the book's second section from Osaka, introducing readers to his estranged father and his bar, which Mike is soon running. This is a love story, writ large, that sings in small moments. While Ben is Black and grew up middle-class, and Mike's family scrapped their way through roach-ridden apartments after immigrating, the men have far more in common than they realize (even if each has his own particular reasons for thinking things won't work out). Forced apart, and deeper into the families they'd all but separated from, or maybe never knew to begin with, they grow in wholly unanticipated ways. As in his short story collection, Lot (2019), Washington writes about race, class, family, love, and the idea of home with evocative nuance and phenomenal dialogue.

In Washington's debut novel (after the collection Lot), the fractures in a couple's relationship span from Houston, Tex., to Osaka, Japan. Ben, a day care teacher, lives with his cook boyfriend, Mike, in Houston's slowly gentrifying Third Ward. When Mike's mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Houston from Japan with plans to stay at Ben and Mike's place, awkwardness ensues. Mike has just left for Osaka, to reconnect with his absent and now terminally ill father, and put Ben in charge of entertaining Mitsuko until he gets back. Ben eventually adjusts to having her around, just as he must navigate his changing relationship with his black middle-class family, who have always shied away from Ben's HIV-positive status and talked around his father's drinking. Meanwhile, in Osaka, Mike has found his father, Eiju, at the bar he owns, where Eiju has a dedicated assistant and crowd of regulars who have no idea Eiju's dying or that he has a son. Mike starts working at the bar so he can spend Eiju's final days with him. Though Mike still grapples with how to feel about Eiju, who made his biggest impact on Mike's life by abandoning the family, father and son are able to build a tentative relationship. Tender, funny, and heartbreaking, this tale of family, food (Mike cooks for their Venezuelan neighbors; Mitsuko makes Ben congee), and growing apart feels intimate and expansive at the same time. Washington shows readers more of the unforgettable Houston he introduced in his stories, and comfortably expands his range into the setting of Osaka, applying nuance in equal measure to his characters and the places they're tied to. (Oct.)

Benson and Mike, a mixed-race couple in Houston, search for the truth about themselves, each other, and their families. This debut novel from Washington--author of the award-winning story collection Lot (2019)--is split into three vividly written sections. The first and third are narrated by Benson, an African American man living in Houston with his boyfriend, Mike, who narrates the middle section. Benson and Mike are on the verge of breaking up, but their passion for each other keeps them from being able to fully pull away. Both men have families they feel distant from: Benson's father is an alcoholic who never fully accepted his son's homosexuality, and Mike's divorced parents have both left Houston for their native Japan. At the start of the novel, Mike's mother, Mitsuko, flies to Houston to visit him at the same time that his father, Eiju, falls seriously ill back in Osaka. Mike picks Mitsuko up from the airport, leaves her with Benson, then flies across the ocean to visit Eiju, whom he hasn't seen in years. Neither Benson nor Mitsuko is happy about being stuck with each other, but they slowly develop a relationship that's not quite friendship and not quite family. They both love the same man, and that's enough to help them understand each other. In Osaka, Mike cares for his sick, grumpy father and helps him run his bar though their relationship is strained. Mike isn't rushing to forgive his homophobic father for leaving the family in Houston, and Eiju is cold and distant. Both Mike and Benson fall into relationships with other men while they're apart, and ultimately, both have to decide how to forgive the people closest to them. Washington's novel is richly layered and thrives in the quiet moments between lovers and family members. Benson and Mike know they could hurt each other, hurt their families, hurt themselves, or they could say words to heal and bring people together. As Mike says, "How did everything come to such a turning point between us? Quietly, I guess. The big moments are never big when they're actually fucking happening." There is passion in this novel--fight scenes, sex scenes, screaming matches, and tears--but it reaches a deep poetic realism when Washington explores the space between characters. When so much is left unsaid, that's when this novel speaks the loudest. A subtle and moving exploration of love, family, race, and the long, frustrating search for home. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

DEBUt National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree Washington follows up Lot, his LJ best-booked debut story collection, with an accomplished debut novel featuring cautious African American day care worker Benson and Mike, a Japanese American cook who's more open and questing. Mike is estranged from his father, who returned home as their life in America fell apart; eventually, his mother returned as well. Benson, too, has issues with a family fractured by his father's drinking and his mother's remarriage. The two men have been living together in Houston for four years when Mike rushes back to Japan after learning that his father is dying, even as his mother returns to Houston for a visit and must stay alone with Benson. Cracks were already beginning to form between Mike and Benson, and Washington deftly strings together the ordinary moments that make and can break a relationship, resulting in an alternately told heart-on-sleeve narrative probing racial and gay identity, the ties between lovers and between parents and children, and the resonant idea that in the midst of that hot mess called human relationships we just have to figure things out. VERDICT Briskly and brightly told, this deeply affecting work is an astonishingly rendered novel of love in crisis. Highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal