Reviews
""A masterpiece . . . For Emma is an extraordinary novel; a treatise of love and loss, the terror of the modern world and the sprung, high-tech trap humanity has set for itself. This would be more than enough: awe inspiringly, it's also a page-turning thriller, and it confirms its author as the eminent fiction writer of our times.""--Irvine Welsh ""Absolutely wonderful . . . riveting, sad, mad and terrifying.""--Terry Gilliam ""Harrowing, tragic and moving.""--Ian Rankin ""For Emma is as disturbing as it is convincing, a tale of love and guilt and grief, and an apt tract for our chaotic times.""--John Banville ""Ewan Morrison's harrowing and beautiful new novel, For Emma, is an early warning system for the future. In that way, a worthy successor to Easy Travel to Other Planets, Neuromancer, and, of course, Brave New World.""--David Shields, author of Reality Hunger ""This book scared me like no horror story ever has, because its monster is right in front of us, right now, eating us slowly while we cheer.""--Isaac Marion. Author Warm Bodies ""For Emma is a brilliant book that you will devour. Its compelling exploration of love, loss, and the haunting power of technology and morality makes it a must-read, delving into the highly relevant and intriguing intersection of humanity and advanced AI.""--Bruna Papandrea, Producer of Gone Girl and Big Little Lies ""Josh Cartwright, the beguiling protagonist of FOR EMMA, is reminiscent, with all his paranoia and eccentricities, of the tortured heroes of Philip K. Dick. But this tale should not be categorized as speculative. Rather, this brilliant and frightening novel is more like science fact than science fiction. So some day soon when we're all backing up our brains and things get even crazier in our mad world, we'll remember that Ewan Morrison tried to warn us."" --Jonathan Ames, author of A Man Named Doll ""A devastatingly accomplished and cinema-literate nightmare of culture-induced and morally bereft psychotic breakdown: the state in which we are all now registered, observed and disenfranchised. The poetry of paranoia, here, is so compelling, that we are forced to conclude that the very act of tale-telling, authorship, is being dictated by a terrifying otherness. Now read on. Please.""--Iain Sinclair, writer and filmmaker ""For Emma is an astonishing, bold novel . . . heart-rending, but also complex, visceral and angry . . . unlike anything I have read before--a sympathetic, yet abject account of violence. Morrison's eyes are on the horizon. This is the novel for our times, a mordant, coruscating yet exhilarating account of where we will be, sooner than we think.""--Nicholas Blincoe ""Heartbreaking and harrowing, this is a suspenseful journey into a family's tortured past and its nightmarish present. Ewan Morrison's attention to the details of parental love and responsibility make this an unforgettable book."" --Atom Egoyan. Director of The Sweet Hereafter ""Thrilling, unsettling, and fundamentally humane, For Emma is an explosively timely novel. A shifting metafiction of unreliable narration that knowingly calls to mind the gothic horror of Stevenson and Hogg, while relentlessly fixated on the anxieties of our current social age. A disturbing and unflinching glimpse into disillusionment and conspiracy, and a techno-dystopian warning call about the terrors less of the future, than of the now.""--Kieran Hurley, Playwright ""Hold onto your seats for a cracking good ending, which I did not see coming, yet which I felt I should have seen coming--the best kind.""--Lionel Shriver ""As pacey and compelling as a thriller, For Emma is also a skillful exploration of that area where our genuine fears about the global reach of tech giants meet a natural tendency to paranoia. How worried should we be about the rapid advances in artificial intelligence currently underway? Emma's story feels compelling, moving and terrifyingly plausible.""--Miranda France, author and editor ""An incisive novel for our times, written with wit and sensitivity, it tackles huge issues about the future of humanity with great heart""--Doug Johnstone - Author and Critic ""For Emma is a haunting work, resonating and echoing for a long time after reading. Although concerned with AI, it is a human book, both grief soaked and love filled. In For Emma, Morrison has created a true masterpiece, one that endures as testament to his concern for our endangered humanity.""--Ali Millar, author of The Last Days ""A grieving father becomes an avenging angel. A great novel which captures and questions our times. I loved this cinematic and compassionate book.""--Mark Cousins - filmmaker ""If there is a braver novelist in Scotland than Ewan Morrison I don't know who it is.""--James Robertson ""A stunning book. Deeply touching. A beautifully crafted page-turner. I love how we're sucked into a dark eloquent vortex, part gothic/sci-fi/ and detective novel, asking essential questions about AI, but also what it means to love and to stay alive. It has stayed with me deeply, particularly those passages about the father and daughter, the intimacy of grief. As relevant as Frankenstein.""--Susanna Crossman, author of Home is Where We Start ""A brilliant, breath-taking book. For Emma is at once a gripping techno-thriller, a chillingly plausible near-future nightmare, and a moving meditation on loss and grief. Morrison expertly weaves unreliable first person narratives together with scenes of nail-biting tension, sudden violence, dream-like paranoid diatribes, and redacted horrors in blacked out text. Without flinching, he never lets go of the humanity we stand to lose as technology accelerates. Reading For Emma is a terrifying glimpse into a dystopia so close, we can't avoid it.""--Bram E. Gieben, Strange Exiles Podcast ""A worryingly convincing vision of our imminent present. Ewan Morrison is our Michel Houellebecq.""--Prof. Gavin Bowd. Translator of Houellebecq ""Haunting, eerie, and kinetic, For Emma is equal parts sci-fi, dystopia, family tragedy and portrait of an unravelling mind.""--Mary Harrington
""This book really did seem to be about the meaning of life and just so valuable but also completely terrifying...everybody, you must read For Emma""--Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio: Meet the Writers ""[Morrison] has the eerie gift of prophecy""--The Times ""I've long thought Morrison the most interesting Scottish novelist of his generation--in fact, why stick at Scottish?--one who combines seriousness, awareness of a changing world, and has also the traditional qualities of the craft. . . This is perhaps his best work to date--imaginative, serious, and yet also, in its humanity, an expression of love.""--Allan Massie, The Scotsman ""Ewan Morrison's depiction of AI and biotech's future could be a dystopian fiction classic.""--Buzz Magazine ""A Falling Down for the tech bro age--by one of our finest and most challenging novelists.""--Ian Rankin ""A masterpiece . . . For Emma is an extraordinary novel; a treatise of love and loss, the terror of the modern world and the sprung, high-tech trap humanity has set for itself. This would be more than enough: awe inspiringly, it's also a page-turning thriller, and it confirms its author as the eminent fiction writer of our times.""--Irvine Welsh ""Absolutely wonderful . . . riveting, sad, mad and terrifying.""--Terry Gilliam ""A heart-rending, horrifying, dystopian thriller ripped from tomorrow's headlines.""--CJ HOPKINS, author of The Rise of the New Normal Reich and Zone 23 ""For Emma is as disturbing as it is convincing, a tale of love and guilt and grief, and an apt tract for our chaotic times.""--John Banville ""Ewan Morrison's harrowing and beautiful new novel, For Emma, is an early warning system for the future. In that way, a worthy successor to Easy Travel to Other Planets, Neuromancer, and, of course, Brave New World.""--David Shields, author of Reality Hunger ""This book scared me like no horror story ever has, because its monster is right in front of us, right now, eating us slowly while we cheer.""--Isaac Marion. Author Warm Bodies ""For Emma is a brilliant book that you will devour. Its compelling exploration of love, loss, and the haunting power of technology and morality makes it a must-read, delving into the highly relevant and intriguing intersection of humanity and advanced AI.""--Bruna Papandrea, Producer of Gone Girl and Big Little Lies ""Josh Cartwright, the beguiling protagonist of FOR EMMA, is reminiscent, with all his paranoia and eccentricities, of the tortured heroes of Philip K. Dick. But this tale should not be categorized as speculative. Rather, this brilliant and frightening novel is more like science fact than science fiction. So some day soon when we're all backing up our brains and things get even crazier in our mad world, we'll remember that Ewan Morrison tried to warn us."" --Jonathan Ames, author of A Man Named Doll ""A devastatingly accomplished and cinema-literate nightmare of culture-induced and morally bereft psychotic breakdown: the state in which we are all now registered, observed and disenfranchised. The poetry of paranoia, here, is so compelling, that we are forced to conclude that the very act of tale-telling, authorship, is being dictated by a terrifying otherness. Now read on. Please.""--Iain Sinclair, writer and filmmaker ""For Emma is an astonishing, bold novel . . . heart-rending, but also complex, visceral and angry . . . unlike anything I have read before--a sympathetic, yet abject account of violence. Morrison's eyes are on the horizon. This is the novel for our times, a mordant, coruscating yet exhilarating account of where we will be, sooner than we think.""--Nicholas Blincoe ""Heartbreaking and harrowing, this is a suspenseful journey into a family's tortured past and its nightmarish present. Ewan Morrison's attention to the details of parental love and responsibility make this an unforgettable book."" --Atom Egoyan. Director of The Sweet Hereafter ""Thrilling, unsettling, and fundamentally humane, For Emma is an explosively timely novel. A shifting metafiction of unreliable narration that knowingly calls to mind the gothic horror of Stevenson and Hogg, while relentlessly fixated on the anxieties of our current social age. A disturbing and unflinching glimpse into disillusionment and conspiracy, and a techno-dystopian warning call about the terrors less of the future, than of the now.""--Kieran Hurley, Playwright ""Hold onto your seats for a cracking good ending, which I did not see coming, yet which I felt I should have seen coming--the best kind.""--Lionel Shriver ""As pacey and compelling as a thriller, For Emma is also a skillful exploration of that area where our genuine fears about the global reach of tech giants meet a natural tendency to paranoia. How worried should we be about the rapid advances in artificial intelligence currently underway? Emma's story feels compelling, moving and terrifyingly plausible.""--Miranda France, author and editor ""An incisive novel for our times, written with wit and sensitivity, it tackles huge issues about the future of humanity with great heart""--Doug Johnstone - Author and Critic ""For Emma is a haunting work, resonating and echoing for a long time after reading. Although concerned with AI, it is a human book, both grief soaked and love filled. In For Emma, Morrison has created a true masterpiece, one that endures as testament to his concern for our endangered humanity.""--Ali Millar, author of The Last Days ""A grieving father becomes an avenging angel. A great novel which captures and questions our times. I loved this cinematic and compassionate book.""--Mark Cousins - filmmaker ""If there is a braver novelist in Scotland than Ewan Morrison I don't know who it is.""--James Robertson ""A stunning book. Deeply touching. A beautifully crafted page-turner. I love how we're sucked into a dark eloquent vortex, part gothic/sci-fi/ and detective novel, asking essential questions about AI, but also what it means to love and to stay alive. It has stayed with me deeply, particularly those passages about the father and daughter, the intimacy of grief. As relevant as Frankenstein.""--Susanna Crossman, author of Home is Where We Start ""A brilliant, breath-taking book. For Emma is at once a gripping techno-thriller, a chillingly plausible near-future nightmare, and a moving meditation on loss and grief. Morrison expertly weaves unreliable first person narratives together with scenes of nail-biting tension, sudden violence, dream-like paranoid diatribes, and redacted horrors in blacked out text. Without flinching, he never lets go of the humanity we stand to lose as technology accelerates. Reading For Emma is a terrifying glimpse into a dystopia so close, we can't avoid it.""--Bram E. Gieben, Strange Exiles Podcast ""A worryingly convincing vision of our imminent present. Ewan Morrison is our Michel Houellebecq.""--Prof. Gavin Bowd. Translator of Houellebecq ""Haunting, eerie, and kinetic, For Emma is equal parts sci-fi, dystopia, family tragedy and portrait of an unravelling mind.""--Mary Harrington
""I've long thought Morrison the most interesting Scottish novelist of his generation--in fact, why stick at Scottish?--one who combines seriousness, awareness of a changing world, and has also the traditional qualities of the craft. . . This is perhaps his best work to date--imaginative, serious, and yet also, in its humanity, an expression of love.""--Allan Massie, The Scotsman ""Ewan Morrison's depiction of AI and biotech's future could be a dystopian fiction classic.""--Buzz Magazine ""A Falling Down for the tech bro age--by one of our finest and most challenging novelists.""--Ian Rankin ""A masterpiece . . . For Emma is an extraordinary novel; a treatise of love and loss, the terror of the modern world and the sprung, high-tech trap humanity has set for itself. This would be more than enough: awe inspiringly, it's also a page-turning thriller, and it confirms its author as the eminent fiction writer of our times.""--Irvine Welsh ""Absolutely wonderful . . . riveting, sad, mad and terrifying.""--Terry Gilliam ""A heart-rending, horrifying, dystopian thriller ripped from tomorrow's headlines.""--CJ HOPKINS, author of The Rise of the New Normal Reich and Zone 23 ""For Emma is as disturbing as it is convincing, a tale of love and guilt and grief, and an apt tract for our chaotic times.""--John Banville ""Ewan Morrison's harrowing and beautiful new novel, For Emma, is an early warning system for the future. In that way, a worthy successor to Easy Travel to Other Planets, Neuromancer, and, of course, Brave New World.""--David Shields, author of Reality Hunger ""This book scared me like no horror story ever has, because its monster is right in front of us, right now, eating us slowly while we cheer.""--Isaac Marion. Author Warm Bodies ""For Emma is a brilliant book that you will devour. Its compelling exploration of love, loss, and the haunting power of technology and morality makes it a must-read, delving into the highly relevant and intriguing intersection of humanity and advanced AI.""--Bruna Papandrea, Producer of Gone Girl and Big Little Lies ""Josh Cartwright, the beguiling protagonist of FOR EMMA, is reminiscent, with all his paranoia and eccentricities, of the tortured heroes of Philip K. Dick. But this tale should not be categorized as speculative. Rather, this brilliant and frightening novel is more like science fact than science fiction. So some day soon when we're all backing up our brains and things get even crazier in our mad world, we'll remember that Ewan Morrison tried to warn us."" --Jonathan Ames, author of A Man Named Doll ""A devastatingly accomplished and cinema-literate nightmare of culture-induced and morally bereft psychotic breakdown: the state in which we are all now registered, observed and disenfranchised. The poetry of paranoia, here, is so compelling, that we are forced to conclude that the very act of tale-telling, authorship, is being dictated by a terrifying otherness. Now read on. Please.""--Iain Sinclair, writer and filmmaker ""For Emma is an astonishing, bold novel . . . heart-rending, but also complex, visceral and angry . . . unlike anything I have read before--a sympathetic, yet abject account of violence. Morrison's eyes are on the horizon. This is the novel for our times, a mordant, coruscating yet exhilarating account of where we will be, sooner than we think.""--Nicholas Blincoe ""Heartbreaking and harrowing, this is a suspenseful journey into a family's tortured past and its nightmarish present. Ewan Morrison's attention to the details of parental love and responsibility make this an unforgettable book."" --Atom Egoyan. Director of The Sweet Hereafter ""Thrilling, unsettling, and fundamentally humane, For Emma is an explosively timely novel. A shifting metafiction of unreliable narration that knowingly calls to mind the gothic horror of Stevenson and Hogg, while relentlessly fixated on the anxieties of our current social age. A disturbing and unflinching glimpse into disillusionment and conspiracy, and a techno-dystopian warning call about the terrors less of the future, than of the now.""--Kieran Hurley, Playwright ""Hold onto your seats for a cracking good ending, which I did not see coming, yet which I felt I should have seen coming--the best kind.""--Lionel Shriver ""As pacey and compelling as a thriller, For Emma is also a skillful exploration of that area where our genuine fears about the global reach of tech giants meet a natural tendency to paranoia. How worried should we be about the rapid advances in artificial intelligence currently underway? Emma's story feels compelling, moving and terrifyingly plausible.""--Miranda France, author and editor ""An incisive novel for our times, written with wit and sensitivity, it tackles huge issues about the future of humanity with great heart""--Doug Johnstone - Author and Critic ""For Emma is a haunting work, resonating and echoing for a long time after reading. Although concerned with AI, it is a human book, both grief soaked and love filled. In For Emma, Morrison has created a true masterpiece, one that endures as testament to his concern for our endangered humanity.""--Ali Millar, author of The Last Days ""A grieving father becomes an avenging angel. A great novel which captures and questions our times. I loved this cinematic and compassionate book.""--Mark Cousins - filmmaker ""If there is a braver novelist in Scotland than Ewan Morrison I don't know who it is.""--James Robertson ""A stunning book. Deeply touching. A beautifully crafted page-turner. I love how we're sucked into a dark eloquent vortex, part gothic/sci-fi/ and detective novel, asking essential questions about AI, but also what it means to love and to stay alive. It has stayed with me deeply, particularly those passages about the father and daughter, the intimacy of grief. As relevant as Frankenstein.""--Susanna Crossman, author of Home is Where We Start ""A brilliant, breath-taking book. For Emma is at once a gripping techno-thriller, a chillingly plausible near-future nightmare, and a moving meditation on loss and grief. Morrison expertly weaves unreliable first person narratives together with scenes of nail-biting tension, sudden violence, dream-like paranoid diatribes, and redacted horrors in blacked out text. Without flinching, he never lets go of the humanity we stand to lose as technology accelerates. Reading For Emma is a terrifying glimpse into a dystopia so close, we can't avoid it.""--Bram E. Gieben, Strange Exiles Podcast ""A worryingly convincing vision of our imminent present. Ewan Morrison is our Michel Houellebecq.""--Prof. Gavin Bowd. Translator of Houellebecq ""Haunting, eerie, and kinetic, For Emma is equal parts sci-fi, dystopia, family tragedy and portrait of an unravelling mind.""--Mary Harrington
Author Information
Ewan Morrison has been described as the ""most fluent and intelligent Scottish writer of his generation"" by Booker Prize judge Stuart Kelly.Morrison is an award winning novelist and screenwriter and an essayist.His writing has been praised by renowned authors Lionel Shriver, Ian Rankin, Fay Weldon, Douglas Coupland, James Frey, Irvine Welsh, James Robertson, Luke Rhinehart, and Hanif Kureishi among others. Ewan's eighth book, the 'darkly comic thriller, How to Survive Everything was published by Contraband in the UK in 2021, and in the US with Harper Perennial in 2022. Ewan's novel, NINA X,published by Fleet an imprint of Little Brown, won Scotland's most prestigious literary prize-the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year-in 2019, and his novel, Close Your Eyes wasthe winner of the Scottish Book of the Year (SMIT) Fiction Prize in 2013. He is also the winner of the Not the Booker Prize in 2012 for Tales from the Mall (2012) which has been named one of the top 50 Scottish Books of the last 50 years (Scottish Book Trust).Morrison blogs regularly for Psychology Today as""WORD-LESS: A novelist ponders emotional health,"" andwrites regular articles and essays for AREO Magazine on Utopianism, Technology, and Free Speech. Between 2011 & 2013 Morrison was a regular contributor to The Guardian, and hehas contributed articles to The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Daily Mail, L'Express, La Republicca, Quillette, Areo, Scotland on Sunday, The Scotsman, The Erotic Review, GQ, Esquire, Arena, Mute, Frieze, The Psychologist and Psychology Today. Ewan can be found on X at @mrewanmorrison.
