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.

A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken cocktail party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A lonely professional tries to convince herself that the working-class boyfriend she dumped in 1984 is her one true love. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A middle-aged man seeks to distract himself from the mess he's made of his marriage by flirting with a stranger on a country road. From the parking lot at Disney World to a Chinese restaurant in Halifax to an old-growth forest in BC, 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.