Open Up

Thomas Morris

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

“This brilliant, funny, unsettling book is a work of deep psychological realism and a philosophical inquiry at the same time. Thomas Morris is a master of the contemporary short story, and the stories in this collection are his best yet.” —SALLY ROONEY author of INTERMEZZO

Strikingly original and wonderfully tender, Open Up is a vivid exploration of the thrills, challenges, and aches of contemporary life. These five stories pulse with a dark strangeness: a boy’s first football match is charged with secret magic and complicated by his family situation; a young man’s vacation with his partner comes under threat from a dark visitor; a family of seahorses faces growing pains and grief as they fight to come of age and understand their place in the world. Deeply felt and richly rewarding, Open Up is a gorgeous and penetrating examination of human vulnerability, filled with magic and wonder.

Praise for Open Up

“The stories in Open Up are funny, sad, complex, unexpected, and worthy of multiple readings. They’re also bloody brilliant.” —Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13

“Thomas Morris’s second collection of stories, opens and closes with two of the best I’ve ever read… a writer beyond compare.” —Ali Smith, author of Spring

“Such a fierce and tender suite of stories – young boys & lost young men, the psychic effects of poverty and deprived childhoods, and the struggle to love well. Plus a standout story about seahorses. Welsh wizardry from Thomas Morris.” —Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days

“Thomas Morris is incredibly gifted... Open Up not only confirms his unique skill and sensitivity as a writer, these stories positively redefine masculism, taking apart identity constructions, exploring conflicted territories, and offering up nuanced, progressive perspectives. It’s so heartening to read his work.” —Sarah Hall, author of Burncoat

“The stories in Thomas Morris’s Open Up are capable of both astounding imaginative flourishes and evoking the quietest moments of everyday intimacy with heartbreaking attentiveness. These stories are always pleasurably off-kilter, as gently acerbic and sadly wise about the world as the work of George Saunders, Wendy Erskine and Etgar Keret, but written with an assuredness and poignancy that is all Morris’s own.” —Colin Barrett, author of Wild Houses

“With precision, wry humour and a generous heart, Morris visits life's agonies and ecstasies. This diverse and surprising collection is bound together by a strangely prelapsarian hopefulness from which, at any moment, we might fall.” —Nathan Filer

“Across the collection, the clarity and feeling with which Morris writes about south Wales, and his broader commitment to using short fiction to examine a place and its people, put me in mind of James Joyce's landmark 1914 collection Dubliners.” ―Financial Times

“Open Up is truly a descent into an underworld, each story darker and more punishing than the last. . . After finishing this collection, I had two main conclusions. I no longer despair for the future of male fiction writing and I can't wait to read the novel Morris has in him.” —Literary Review

“[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.” ―The Guardian

“If his first collection [was] the work of a master plumber, the second is that of a diviner […] a tender, tragicomic delight.” —Martin Doyle, The Irish Times

“[T]his new volume is poignant, surprising and thoughtful […] Morris’s skill lies in how he’s able to draw out the love and optimism and hope in the middle of all life’s bullshit.” —BookMunch

“…thrilling… rewarding… impressive… has the same probing intensity as his debut, but the stories feel risker, an author opening himself up to new forms and styles with a notable playfulness and ingenuity.” —Sarah Gilmartin, The Irish Times

“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… ‘Aberkariad’ feels at once classic and thoroughly unique.” —RTÉ Book of the Week

“… a subtle collection, with each story as meticulously constructed as a Swiss watch; one story in particular, the seahorse-led tale of a single father and his boys, ‘Aberkariad’ is a standout not just of the collection, but […] one of the greatest short stories I’ve ever read.” —Barry Pierce, AnOther Magazine

“An eclectic, dazzling collection […] mind-bendingly wonderful.” —Gary Raymond, BBC Radio Wales Arts Show

“As the title implies this second collection of short stories constitutes the flowering of a talent. It is a cause for celebration that a writer of such obvious promise has returned with a volume defined by ambition and vibrant imagination.” —John Lavin, The Lonely Crowd

“Brilliantly crafted… A completely original, at times agonizing, yet completely brilliant collection of short stories. Morris succeeds in creating moments of genuine emotional intensity for his characters, each at a crucial juncture in their own understanding of themselves, and the people and the world around them.” —Jonathan Lee, Nation.Cymru