Open Up

A GRANTA BEST YOUNG BRITISH NOVELIST 2023 'Brilliant, funny, unsettling. . . Thomas Morris is a master of the contemporary short story' SALLY ROONEY 'With precision, wry humour and a generous heart, Morris visits life's agonies and ecstasies.' NATHAN FILER 'A fierce and tender suite of stories' LUCY CALDWELL 'Thomas Morris is incredibly gifted within the form. It's so heartening to read his work.' SARAH HALL 'Funny, sad, complex, unexpected, and worthy of multiple readings.' JON MCGREGOR 'Pleasurably off-kilter, gently acerbic and sadly wise' COLIN BARRETT The new collection from a literary star - five achingly tender, innovative and dazzling stories of (dis)connection. From a child attending his first football match, buoyed by secret magic, and a wincingly humane portrait of adolescence, to the perplexity of grief and loss through the eyes of a seahorse, Thomas Morris seeks to find grace, hope and benevolence in the churning tumult of self-discovery. Philosophically acute. Wincingly humane. Strikingly original. This outstanding suite of stories is bursting with a bracing emotional depth. Open Up cracks the heart as it expands the short story form. Praise for We Don't Know What We're Doing: 'Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and one of the most satisfying collections I've read for years.' ALI SMITH, Guardian 'Books of the Year' 'Masterly. . . marvellous grace and wit.' PHILIP HENSHER 'That tonic gift, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own'. The tonic comes in large doses in Thomas Morris's debut short-story collection.'Irish Times 'Morris's fresh, direct writing style feels brand new.' Metro 'Radiant' Independent

Thomas Morris's debut story collection We Don't Know What We're Doing won The Wales Book of the Year Award, The Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award, and a Somerset Maugham Prize. His stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published and anthologised in Zoetrope, Best European Fiction, and The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story. Born and raised in Caerphilly, South Wales, he now lives in Dublin, where he is Editor-at-Large at The Stinging Fly.