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. (From Biblioasis)

Lisa Alward's short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize Stories 2017, Best Canadian Stories 2017 and Best Canadian Stories 2016. She is the winner of the New Quarterly's 2016 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award as well as the 2015 Fiddlehead Short Fiction Prize. She lives in Fredericton. She was on the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Orlando 1974 which is included in Cocktail.