Cocktail - Lisa Alward

“The problem with parties, my mother says, is people don’t drink enough…”

Lisa Alward is a Canadian author who worked in literary publishing in Toronto in the 80s and began writing fiction at 50. Cocktail is her debut collection of stories set in the 1960s to the present. The title story opens with a cocktail party with the children watching the adults from the staircase. Later a drunken guest appears in a young girl’s bedroom. Her brother appears at the door, preventing the man from doing something potentially harmful but the girl remembers the man and, in later years longs for him and searches for his face in bars. The stories in this collection focus on women at progressive stages of life in different decades - teenagers, college students, women with babies, grandmothers and all of them seem real. They could be my friends or relatives or me. The stories are wonderful and I will read as much of Alward’s work as she can write.