"A masterpiece ... the eminent fiction writer of our times"

IRVINE WELSH

 

For Emma is the story of a young genius Silicon Valley scientist who dies in a secret AI brain chip experiment. Her voice then haunts her father and helps him plan the killing of the Big Tech CEO who destroyed her.

It’s a ghost-in-the machine tale of bereavement and of a unique and conflicted love between a daughter and her father.For Emma delves deep into the moral conflicts of new human-computer technologies and asks whether humanity can survive our accelerating drive towards the future that promises us digital immortality.

This is Morrison’s 9th book. For Emma will be published in March 2025. 

 

In our dystopian world, elite-owned technology runs rampant, determined to reduce us to barely sentient slaves as it harvests our life experiences for its exponential growth. It’s crucial that the true expressions of all that’s best in humanity - art and love – step up to the plate.

Ewan Morrison’s 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 it’s author as the eminent fiction writer of our times.

Irvine Welsh  

 

praise for FOR EMMA: 

 “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 

“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

“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, filmmaker

"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 – The Sweet Hereafter

“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 - Gone Girl, Big Little Lies

“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 – Reality Hunger

“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 pacy and compelling as a thriller, For Emma is also a skilful 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

“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

“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 - 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. The scenario Morrison depicts in his latest work is terrifyingly possible, perhaps just around the corner, or even already here. He exposes the tension between our desire for the possible benefits of AI and our instinctive resistance to its dehumanising effects. For Emma is a fast-paced techno-thriller, but it’s also a love story about the despair that failed love brings. And maybe, too, it’s a warning, that in the name of progress we may be powering up the instruments of our own destruction as a species.”

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 - 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

  

 

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