New novel by acclaimed Wick author who ‘predicts the future’
Award-winning novelist Ewan Morrison from Wick has been lauded by eminent critics for his latest book due out in March 2025.
Described as a “technogothic novel”, ‘For Emma’ is Ewan’s ninth book and is now available to preorder from Amazon at: www.amazon.co.uk/Emma-Ewan-Morrison/dp/1914090950
For Emma is a gripping, high-stakes, high-concept thriller, which fuses futurism with a powerful emotional core. It has already received widespread praise from leading writers and cultural figureheads including Irvine Welsh, Ian Rankin, Terry Gilliam, Miranda France and more.
In the book’s synopsis, Emma is described as a young Silicon Valley scientist and a genius who dies in a secret AI brain chip experiment. Her voice then haunts her father, helping him plan the killing of the Big Tech CEO who destroyed her.
For Emma is a ghost-in-the-machine tale of bereavement and a unique and conflicted love between a daughter and her father.
Ewan says: “Technological accelerationism is an escapist delusion – a flight from nihilism into fantasies of ‘super humans’. Musk has a lot to answer for.
“Brain chip experiments will kill people. The entire project of achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) through implanting computers chips and threads in human brains is flawed and will be lethal for human ‘lab rats’ if it is rolled out. It violates the Geneva Convention.”
Peter Burnett from Leamington Books, publishers of For Emma, says: “Ewan Morrison has a reputation for jumping ahead of the zeitgeist and making prophetic statements. In 2012 in a piece for The Guardian he predicted that AI would enter into the publishing industry with the results that we are in fact seeing today.
“Ewan also predicted ‘Disease X’ in 2021 and his most recent narratives about the rise of neo-luddites are starting to appear to be more than works of imagination.
“He predicted the decline of the shopping mall in a book admired by Douglas Coupland and Iain Sinclair, the latter of which compared the novel Tales From The Mall to JG Ballard. In Ewan’s early novels and short stories, he was writing about online dating and internet-related-promiscuity, long before we saw these trends emerge and become the new norm.”
He continues: “The predictions in For Emma are that big tech and biotech are merging, that there will be covert brain chip experiments with results that are covered up and that have a human cost; and that people will be silenced for questioning it.
“Above all, through his writing over the last decade and a half, Morrison consistently explores and exposes how new technologies are altering what it means to be human.”
Irvine Welsh describes the book as “a masterpiece” and Ewan as “the eminent fiction writer of our times".
Atom Egoyan says: "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."
The book is available for preorder from Amazon.
For Emma is published on March 25, 2025 by Leamington books, 414pp, priced at £19.99 for hardcover and £10.99 for paperback.