Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Fiction, Short Stories
Number of pages: 159
ISBN: 9781781726891
Publication date: September 22, 2022
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Fiction, Short Stories
Number of pages: 159
ISBN: 9781781726907
Publication date: September 22, 2022
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2023
In a world of uncertainties, how do human beings navigate the increasingly complex interrelations of love, desire, home, community? Each story in Scar Tissue offers a fresh perspective on the nature of individual existence in all its transient vulnerability. From deep country on the Welsh borders to the metropolitan precincts of London or Paris; from the forests of Scandinavia to neatly clapboarded New England; from a Spanish finca to Dulles airport; and from the steamy environs of Mumbai to the cooler spaces of a medieval farmhouse in Snowdonia – all these disparate realms intersect with the perennial human need to belong and the impossibility of doing so. The irreducibility of time acts as a continuo throughout the narratives and links loss with longing, hope with love and reveals the tentacular hold the past can have on all present aims and imperatives.
In these lyrical, evocative and searching stories, Scar Tissue unflinchingly explores the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world.
Clare Morgan considers similar themes in her first collection An Affair of the Heart.
Clare Morgan
Clare Morgan is a fiction writer and literary critic who lives in Gwynedd and Oxford. Her novel A Book for All and None was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and her short story collection, An Affair of the Heart, by Seren. Her stories have been widely anthologized, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her book What Poetry Brings to Business was published by University of Michigan Press and her recent writing on the subject has featured in the Wall Street Journal, FastCompany, and Humanizing Business: What Humanities can say to Business. She is founder and director of Oxford University’s creative writing degree programme, and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford.
Her new collection of short stories Scar Tissue was published by Seren in September 2022, alongside a reprint of An Affair of the Heart.
“It’s been a long time since I read An Affair of the Heart, Clare Morgan’s 1996 debut short story collection, but the stories stayed with me for a long time afterwards … what I remember is still the deftness of Morgan’s writing, her ability to paint a picture with her words and then draw the reader almost entirely into that vision. There was something vaguely hypnotic about it. Twenty-six years later and that same deftness of touch is there in Scar Tissue.”
Emma Schofield, Wales Arts Review
“It is a delight to discover these stories which… scorch themselves onto the mind’s eye in a way that a flash of brilliance remains imprinted on the retina long after the event… In ‘The Little Lost Ones’… there are lines of such agonising brevity that they stop the heart… leaving the reader with the ghost of a feeling, an ache in the collective memory; the knowledge that this is how art changes you, this is what it reveals.”
Sophie McKeand, Planet
Clare Morgan reads an extract from her story ‘Breathing on the Moon’:
