Open Up
From a Granta Best Young Novelist 2023 – five achingly tender, innovative and dazzling stories of (dis)connection.
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A GRANTA BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELIST 2023
A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE
‘I love this book.’ BRANDON TAYLOR
‘Extraordinary and original.’ Sunday Times
‘Brilliant, funny, unsettling.’ SALLY ROONEY
‘Impressive.’ Irish Times
‘A writer beyond compare.’ ALI SMITH
‘Fierce and tender.’ LUCY CALDWELL
‘Astounding.’ COLIN BARRETT
‘Worthy of multiple readings.’ JON McGREGOR
The new collection from a literary star – five achingly tender, innovative and dazzling stories of (dis)connection.
From Wales to Croatia to the depths of the ocean, these five achingly tender stories of (dis)connection are bursting with emotional vulnerability. A child attends his first football match, buoyed by secret magic; a young seahorse grapples with grief and loss; a troubled young man gets his birthday teeth. Strikingly original and wincingly humane, Open Up seeks to find grace, hope and benevolence in the churning tumult of self-discovery.
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
His stories of disenfranchised lives are philosophical in tone yet retain a sense of urgency. . . Cumulatively, the five stories combine to an impressive whole. As with the best short stories, they expand in the reader’s mind. Open Up is an enjoyable, rewarding book whose wacky scenarios contain multitudes – a thrilling excavation of lives under water in more ways than one.
[Morris] articulates loneliness and the desire to feel connected to someone with great delicacy, subtly highlighting the early traumas that might make connection difficult [...] It’s a fine study of young men not quite living their lives.
I love this book.
Open Up sits in the tradition of great Celtic storytelling. . . The lyrical spareness of his prose elicits only the purest empathy, and there is a sense always that in each of the stories every detail, every image, has had to earn its place in the overall narrative arc. The result is that even the most intricate aspects of masculinity are dissected with care.
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…
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Thomas Morris, a Granta Best Young Novelist 2023, shares six short stories that informed Open Up – his new collection …
Faber has acquired Open Up, a dazzling, achingly tender short-story collection from prize-winning author Thomas Morris.