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.
 

"In 2015, after I published my debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, my mother read the book, and said to me: I am proud of you for writing a book, but I think that you know more.

The remark annoyed me – obviously! – for many reasons, though it mostly annoyed me because I knew, with a heavy heart, that she was right. Well, kind of. I did know more. Or ather, I was convinced that I felt, understood, and intuited more about life than I had been able to capture in my stories. But I had no idea how to access those places on the page. Writing my first book, I had worked as hard as I’d ever worked on anything, and by the end I felt if I’d reached a ceiling on my abilities as a writer. I had no idea how to raise the roof.

On some level, I understood that I was in need of a blood transfusion – new ideas, new thoughts, new ways of approaching the challenge of understanding myself, the world, and this mediating form of understanding that we call ‘fiction’. As with many things in my life, I didn’t quite know how to go about the task I had set myself. But I suspected that reading was as good as place as any to begin.

Without being conscious of it at the time, I can see now that I was increasingly drawn to writing which especially sought to map the tumultuous regions that we call “the inner life”. Encountering these territories on the page brought me deeper into myself, into a basement I had never before known existed, a space where I could – if I learned to listened carefully – hear the murmurs (and stifled screams) of my thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

I won’t lie: becoming attentive to these tremors in my blood led me to difficult, challenging places. For a long time I felt lost and stuck and very low. But these places also led me into extraordinary conversations with friends and family, and brought me eventually into exhilarating and surprising worlds in my own work. ‘Open Up’ was written over the course of six years, and includes – amongst others – ‘Aberkariad’, a novella about a heartbroken seahorse who’s as perplexed by the meaning of his chance existence as I certainly was when trying to comprehend my own confusing life.

Anyway. Below are fifty books that I read during this particular period of time, and which helped me get to where I needed to go. Their pages were like flashes of lightning on a dark night, illuminating an inner landscape that had previously remained hidden to me. If there is a connecting thread between the books – some quality that they all share beyond my having read them – it’s maybe best expressed by a quotation from Clarice Lispector’s ‘Hour of the Star’, which I’ve used as the epigraph for ‘Open Up’:

‘The facts are sonorous but between the facts there’s a whispering. It’s the whispering that astounds me.’ "
 

Thomas Morris, 2023

About the author
Thomas Morris is from Caerphilly, South Wales. He was educated solely through the Welsh language until the age of eighteen and, in his teens, trialled at Cardiff City and played Welsh League football. He studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. He lives in Dublin, where he is the editor of The Stinging Fly magazine.


Please note, Amina Cain's Creature and Georg Büchner's Lenz were also selected, but are currently unavailable via Bookshop.org