Caerphilly is itself a character in Thomas Morris’s debut collection of stories: its castle, shopping centre and Big Cheese fair. The latter is the setting for a date between pensioners in the sweetly entertaining Strange Traffic, while in Castle View, a starting-to-go-to-seed twentysomething reflects on his pristine new estate house, which comes sans advertised vista. Instead, the prospect is of Caerphilly mountain, which – in a quiet masterstroke of quarter-life crisis – he finds brings the words “hump and bald and tired” to mind. A fitness kick duly ensues.
Other highlights include the Dublin stag-do hijinks of the brilliantly judged All the Boys, and Big Pit, in which the narrator’s sister is revealed to be as unstable as the gases that slowly gather in a coalmine. If Morris’s protagonists are messily muddling through, it is in contrast to the assurance of their creator.
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing is published by Faber (£12.99). Click here to order a copy for £10.39
