For Emma | Ewan Morrison | Trailer
Emma is a young genius Silicon Valley scientist, who dies in a secret AI brain chip experiment. Her voice haunts her father and helps him plan the killing of the Big Tech CEO who destroyed her.
For Emma is a ghost-in-the machine tale of bereavement and of a unique and conflicted love between a daughter and her father.
This is Ewan Morrison’s ninth book and eighth novel. For Emma is published in the UK by Leamington books in March 2025.
"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. 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
“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
Author
“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, RLS fellow
“Compelling, moving and terribly plausible.”
Miranda France
Director - The Sweet Hereafter
“For Emma is as disturbing as it is convincing, a tale of love and guilt and grief, and an apt tract for out chaotic times.”
John Banville
“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 and Author
"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, Ava Anna Ada
“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
Author
“A stunning book. Deeply touching. A beautifully crafted page-turner. I love how we're sucked into a dark eloquent vortex, part gothic, part 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
Author, Strange Exiles Podcast