Leamington Books lands Ewan Morrison's thriller about an AI brain chip

Edinburgh independent Leamington Books has landed For Emma, a thriller about an AI brain chip, from Ewan Morrison. 

Publisher Peter Burnett acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Matthew Hamilton at the Hamilton Agency. The novel will be published in March 2025. 

For Emma follows the titular scientist who dies in a secret brain-chip experiment. Her voice then begins to haunt her father and helps him plan the death of the chief executive whose experiment killed Emma. 

Morrison won the Saltire Society Scottish Fiction Book of the Year in 2019 and was longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for the Scottish Crime Book of the Year 2021. He commented: "I’m thrilled to be publishing For Emma with Leamington Books. The editorial vision and courage of Peter Burnett and the literary cult novels he has produced have really impressed me. For Emma is a layered novel that balances a tale of family bereavement and revenge with a covert AI experiment and its human cost." 

Burnett said: "There are so many developments in Ewan’s themes and style in For Emma. Readers will be surprised. This feels like a huge novel. It’s a ghost-in-the machine tale of bereavement and a unique, conflicted love between a daughter and her father. Like Ewan’s other novels, it’s the characters voices that are so well crafted and give it its power as much as the vision and setting."