The strangers attend an evening party.
The strangers don't know each other.
The strangers hardly know themselves.
The Evening Party is a series of prose and poems, unveiling hidden stories of strangers brought together for the same rooftop party in London. They are each riddled with the anxieties of modern age, the complexities of love, the challenges of dysfunctional families and other intricate relationships, and a pervasive sense of being trapped in their own existence. This collection reveals a poignant tapestry of human connection and isolation. The Evening Party unveils the extraordinary in the mundane, breathing life into the passage of time and the memories that define us. The Evening Party is a mirror, an usher, and a reminder to savour moments that otherwise slip through our fingers unnoticed. *
Ah, we're an ungrateful race! When I look at my hand upon the window sill and think what pleasure I've had in it, how it's touched silk and pottery and hot walls, laid itself flat upon wet grass or sun-baked, let the atlantic spurt through its fingers, snapped blue bells and daffodils, plucked ripe plums, never for a second since I was born ceased to tell me of hot and cold, damp or dryness, I'm amazed that I should use this wonderful composition of flesh and nerve to write the abuse of life. Yet that's what we do. Come to think of it, literature is the record of our discontent.
- The Evening Party, Virginia Woolf
'Just imagine', he began, 'and it always happens like this. Today, as I was going downstairs to take a short walk before the evening party, I couldn't help being surprised by the way my hands were dangling about in my cuffs, and they were doing it so gaily. Which promptly made me think: Just wait, something's going to happen today. And it did, too.'
- Description of a struggle, Franz Kafka
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REVIEWS
The poems feel like sitting on the edge of a sofa on New Year's Eve, drink in hand, laughter in your mouth and inner turmoil in your heart. - Sallie Lundh, Apricity
The Evening Party beautifully captures the many ways that people weave in and out of each other's lives, leaving behind memories and questions that linger with us. You will pick up threads throughout the book of people living their separate lives, and how their paths have crossed over the years. Cao paints vivid pictures of life's mundanities in poems and prose that bubble with youth and wonder, yet ache with the memory of long-abandoned flames. The Evening Party invites you to revisit the past beneath tipsy moonlight and discover almost-forgotten stories that are both complex and tender. - Jasmine S. Higgins, Mermaid lungs