-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
"A writer to watch." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he's made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life's watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull.
Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.
"With a coolly dispassionate voice, Alward views the small horrors of domesticity, [...] and turns them into stories whose implications reverberate far beyond the walls of any home."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Comprised of exceptional works of literary and emotional precision, Cocktail showcases author Lisa Alward's genuine and imaginative flair for the kind of narrative driven storytelling style that is as engaging as it is memorable."
—Midwest Book Review
"This collection of twelve pristine short stories might best be described as small snapshots of lives shadowed by disquietude. The writing is crisp, accomplished and assured, and the characters are vividly and sympathetically drawn, as they experience the emotional convolutions of individuals struggling between that which they believe to be right and that which they desire."
—Miramichi Reader
"Alward sets her protagonists down at personal crossroads so astutely observed that it is impossible to look away. We watch with hope, amusement, and dismay, but also—and this is her uncanny power as a storyteller—with the disquieting sense that we, too, have been caught in the mirror."
—Anne Marie Todkill, author of Orion Sweeping
"The stories in Lisa Alward's Cocktail are small wonderments, marked by their intense focus on the telling interplay between wives and husbands, children and parents, and intimate strangers that recalls the early work of Alice Munro."
—Craig Davidson, author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club
This information about Cocktail was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lisa Alward grew up in Halifax during the 1960s and 70s. She worked in literary publishing in Toronto in the 80s and began writing fiction at 50. Her stories have won The Fiddlehead Prize and the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories, as well as literary journals such as The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, untethered, Prairie Fire, and Exile. She lives with her husband, John, near the Wolastoq River in Fredericton.
If you liked Cocktail, try these:
by Ed Park
Published 2026
A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life, from the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams.
The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac
by Louise Kennedy
Published 2024
Brilliant, dark stories of women's lives by "a very major talent" (Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times)
by Sloane Crosley
Published 2023
Hilariously insightful and delightfully suspenseful, Cult Classic is an original: a masterfully crafted tale of love, memory, morality, and mind control, as well as a fresh foray into the philosophy of romance.
Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
