Praise for Cocktail
"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)
"Lisa Alward’s Cocktail is skillful in its ability to capture the nuance and details of daily life in a way that is striking and deeply felt. With beautiful, precise descriptions and expert pacing, she effortlessly reveals tensions that feel both classic and utterly her own. Exploring the emotional and sexual tensions of couples and families in the Sixties and Seventies, these narratives bring the reader to the core of those unspoken moments, leaving us unsettled. The clarity of sound in Lisa Alward's sentences—word after word after word—makes it impossible to turn your ear away. This is a quiet voice that booms."
—Danuta Gleed Literary Award Jury Citation
"A Canadian writer to watch."
—Deborah Dundas, Toronto Star
"Throughout Lisa Alward’s debut story collection, deceptively unassuming items . . . prompt a diverse cast of characters to reflect on events that have changed their lives . . . Alward’s sure-footed writing ably steers readers through stories about injuries, marriages, new parenthood, and other watershed moments."
—Literary Review of Canada
"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
"Lisa Alward has succeeded in producing a collection that is completely enjoyable"
—Winnipeg Free Press
"Alward’s stories teem with vividly honest portraits of human relationships, and her writerly insight lies in clearly seeing our blind spots."
—The Fiddlehead
"Cocktail, her first book, is a knockout collection of short stories that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading. The stories are told with a wise attention to craft and the human condition that upends expectations, holding a mirror to the darkness, despair and desire that live in every person."
—The Tyee
"Fireflies glow brightly then extinguish themselves, leaving only the ghost of a trace to mark their passage. The stories in Alward’s collection are similarly evanescent, but their potency lies in their precise style and compactness. This is a collection to savour."
—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
"These are stories about houses and the secrets they hold, about fractured families and the limits of family life—the end of childhood, a marriage unravelled."
—Pickle Me This
"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
★ 2023-06-08
A finely detailed debut collection of stories set in Canada from the 1960s to the present.
Alward often begins in a sharply evoked past time and then swoops forward into the present to record the impact of a past experience on her characters. In the brief and evocative title story, she opens in the seemingly familiar territory of a party in the 1970s that is being observed by children exiled upstairs while “the grownups put on their party clothes and seemed to forget us.” In her bedroom, the narrator, 10 or 11 at the time, is visited by one of her parents’ friends, and what might have gone horribly wrong doesn’t only because her brother appears at the door. Decades later, her parents divorced, the narrator finds herself inexplicably seeking this man “in beer cellars and dance halls and country-and-western bars.” Two of the stories view a similarly splintered nuclear family from radically different angles. In “Old Growth,” Gwyneth takes a road trip with her ex-husband, Ray, to check out some land he intends to buy, while in “Bear Country,” set a few years earlier but appearing later in the collection, Ray, in the family cabin soon to be sold, spends the summer with his troubled teenage son while a bear lurks nearby. Alward is a master of near disasters: “Bundle of Joy” starts out as a satire about a critical mother going for a visit to meet her infant grandson and complaining about the infant’s short legs and her son-in-law’s beard, which reminds her of “a neglected box hedge.” As grandma Ruth consumes ever more alcohol, the story veers into an account of an accident involving the child and then takes an unexpected turn into sympathy for Ruth. With a coolly dispassionate voice, Alward views the small horrors of domesticity, “the ungodly screech of the Fisher-Price phone as its bulbous eyes rolled back” or the creaking strain on a marriage inflicted by the necessity of removing six layers of wallpaper, and turns them into stories whose implications reverberate far beyond the walls of any home.
Refreshingly tart reflections on family fragmentation and its aftershocks.
