On a summer night in 2012 in Graz, Austria, while on a programme to learn German, Brandon Cook taught his visiting parents the German toast, prost! It was also on that evening that the thought of compiling a selection of toasts and drinking rituals in a coffee-table-like book first came up. The idea took shape a few years later in the form of a small book of 50 toasts bound at a local stationery shop and put together as a Christmas present for his mother. “I called it Cheers! A Handbook to World Culture, One Sip at a Time,” says Cook in an email conversation with mid-day. “She cried!” he recalls. A year later, he decided to expand the book into its present form.

Cheers! Around the World in 80 Toasts (Red Lightning Books) celebrates traditions around toasting in different parts of the world, from how the Dutch ‘proost’ spoken without looking eye to eye can result in seven years’ bad sex to the Korean practice of ‘yaja’ time where social roles and honorifics in a celebration party are reversed. It lists languages categorised by region, from the European Finnish, Latvian and Serbian to the Asian Hindi, Malayalam, Nepali and Tamil, and even constructed ones like Na’vi, the language of James Cameron’s Avatar, and JRR Tolkien’s Elvish language Quenya. “I also really wanted to get Dothraki, but nobody answered my emails,” rues the author, alluding to the language spoken by the nomadic Dothraki in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, turned into the cultural phenomenon that was HBO’s Game of Thrones.