I read two great debut short story collections last year – Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin, which was last month’s Irish Times Book Club choice; and We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris, which is this month’s Irish Times Book Club choice.
Just as all of the stories in his friend Colin Barrett’s award-winning debut collection, Young Skins, were set in Glenbeigh, a fictional and godforsaken town in the west of Ireland, so too is there a unity of place in Morris’s collection, all but one of which are set in his native Caerphilly, a sleepy castle town in south Wales.
The exception, all the boys, is really just Caerphilly on tour, a stag weekend in Dublin. This exceptional tragicomic story, told in the future tense, will be published here tomorrow as the last of our 12 Days of Stories series.
The stories may not range very far geographically, but Morris manages to display remarkable range for a young man in his cast of characters, proving himself equally at home in a middle-aged woman’s heels or an old man’s slippers. And the last story in the collection, Nos Da, is a great feat of imagination, as successful as it is ambitious.
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing offers vivid, funny and moving glimpses of the lost, lonely and bemused. By turns poignant, witty, and tender – these stories detail the lives of people who know where they are, but don’t know what they’re doing.
A young video shop assistant exchanges the home comforts of one mother-figure for a fleeting encounter with another; a brother and sister find themselves at the bottom of a coal mine with a Japanese tourist; a Welsh stag on a debauched weekend in Dublin confesses an unimaginable truth; and a twice-widowed pensioner tries to persuade the lovely Mrs Morgan to be his date at the town’s summer festival...
Over the next four weeks, we will be exploring this stories with articles by the author, his editor at Faber, Hannah Griffiths, critics and fellow writers, including Philip Coleman who taught Morris at Trinity College Dublin. The series will conclude with a podcast interview with the author by myself, to be recorded at a live event in the Irish Writers Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin, on Thursday, January 28th, at 7.30pm.
Morris is editor of The Stinging Fly magazine and edited Dubliners 100, a Tramp Press collection of stories updating James Joyces’s original to mark its centenary.
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris is published by Faber, at £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount to Irish Times Book Club readers.
Reviews
"Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and not just a book of the year for me but one of the most satisfying collections I've read for years." (Ali Smith, Guardian Books of the Year)
The power of great literature lies in its ability to reflect society. Writing about John McGahern, the American author John Updike called it ‘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. (Sarah Gilmartin, The Irish Times)
I was impressed by the sheer guts, as well as the sheer excellence, of Thomas Morris's debut collection, We Don't Know What We're Doing. (Belinda McKeon, The Irish Times Books of the Year 2015)
I recommend Thomas Morris's short story collection . . . deft and rounded lives of friendship and other engagements. (Philip Hensher)
"Beguiling [and] spellblinding... Thomas Morris does for his Welsh home town what Dylan Thomas did for Swansea... The two bear comparison for their wit, warmth, originality and verbal dexterity" (David Collard, TLS)
"real, dazzling, insouciant brilliance... an important new voice in Welsh literature" (Wales Arts Review)
A beautiful, emotionally searching collection of stories about youth, responsibility and growing up. (Francesca Wade, The Telegraph)
"beguiling... Morris has a fantastic, near forensic eye for the ordinary details of life" (Bernadette McNulty, The Telegraph)
"These ten stories are grounded and utterly glorious ... they are distinct but all of a piece, delights to savour." (Literary Review)
"[T]here's something radiant about the frankness of his writing." (Independent)
"I loved the characters in We Don't Know What We're Doing, Thomas Morris's debut collection of stories. They are mostly young and insecure, yet capable of perplexing insight." (Sara Baume, Guardian Book of the Year)
"a truly marvellous thing... belongs on the shelf next to Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio... a very exciting moment for literature in Wales." (New Welsh Review)
“deep and heartfelt... tender and poignant [and] very funny” (Sunday Independent)
[Morris'] fresh, direct writing style feels brand new, slamming the reader up against the chaos of his characters' inner lives in a way that makes you exhilarated and bruised. (Metro)
Touching, sad and lively, this is a great debut from a formidable talent. (Winq)
Thomas Morris’ Caerphilly is a town of first loves, last loves and all degrees of mistakes. Each resident is trying to figure it all out and, in some way, they seem to be doing that together. (Buzz)
