We’re delighted to be welcoming Granta Best Young British Novelist 2023 Thomas Morris to the shop for the launch of his new collection OPEN UP – five achingly tender, innovative and dazzling stories of (dis)connection. Thomas will be in conversation with Valerie O’Riordan.

Doors: 18.30, event starts: 18.45

Tickets are £3.00 or free when pre-ordering a copy of the book. OPEN UP will also be available to purchase on the night and Thomas will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you.

About the book:

‘Brilliant, funny, unsettling. . . Thomas Morris is a master of the contemporary short story’ – Sally Rooney

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.

About the author:

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.