THE BARTENDER'S CURE

Samantha Fisher has no interest in a bartending career. She’s only in New York temporarily, to get some distance from a bad breakup and a brief breakdown while she prepares for the next respectable chapter of her life. But she needs to work in the meantime. When she is offered a job at Joe’s Apothecary, an unassuming but beloved neighborhood bar in Brooklyn, her life takes an unexpected turn.  

Joe’s, home-away-from-home for many, is presided over by a trio of young male mixologists: wannabe-rockstar, Olsen; kind and hard-drinking Han; and the enigmatic manager, Carver. Samantha is surprised to find herself quickly accepted into the tight-knit community of friends, service industry lifers and loyal regulars. Navigating the insular and male-dominated space is not always easy, but Sam finds herself seduced by the job and motivated to learn everything she can about the craft, all the while continuing to push towards the conventional future she always thought she wanted. Pulled apart by these two paths, her search for belonging is further complicated by her struggles with perfectionism, bulimia, and the inescapable specter of her mother’s suicide. 

THE BARTENDER’S CURE is a fiercely relatable story of what it means to search for purpose in our work, cope with trauma and ultimately find meaning and belonging where we least expect it. Reminiscent of Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter, the novel is also a love letter to a profession: interwoven throughout is a bartender’s guide- a delightful journey, taking readers into the hidden world of a profession providing recipes, tricks of the trade, and the (perhaps unreliable) romantically seductive origin stories bartenders share with their customers and one another about our favorite spirits and cocktails.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Wesley Straton is a writer and bartender based in Brooklyn. She writes fiction about found families, alienation, and how where we live shapes who we are. She studied fiction at Brooklyn College, where she received the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award and served as an editor for the Brooklyn Review. Her fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train and has been shortlisted for the Disquiet Literary Prize, and she has written about international bar culture for Roads & Kingdoms, GQ, and Difford’s Guide. The Bartender’s Cure is her debut.