Thomas Morris’s second collection of short stories, the successor volume to his acclaimed debut We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, presents the reader with five studies of the longing to belong. A boy goes to his first Wales football game with his father, who no longer lives with him and his mum, in the year that Wales reach the semi-finals of the Euros and the boy and his mother lose their home. A seahorse tries to fit the lessons his father has taught him on to his own life, as he navigates a world that’s satisfyingly the inverse of our own, full of pregnant dads and absent mums. A frustrated office worker stuck in a dead-end job asks out his best friend by text, having run out of potential matches on Tinder; a young man travels round Croatia with his girlfriend, while trying to break out of the psychological isolation he blames on his father; and another goes to a backstreet dentist to get his teeth sharpened so he looks like a vampire, while his mother barely leaves the house after the death of her husband. The astute reader will have already discerned the presence of certain themes and archetypes achingly familiar to readers of fiction – this is a book filled with shy boys, distant dads, and men not able to connect with women.
