New Author Reviews of ‘The Last Book You Read’ (Short Stories)
“A mini masterpiece. I loved every story. Beautifully, wittily, ferociously and tenderly written. Fantastic.”
Chris Dolan, Author: Ascension Day
“The Last Book You Read and Other Stories’ skilfully evinces the spiritual desolation and desperation, the intense sexual parabolae, of life in the echo chamber that is advanced capitalist society. Yet sewn subtly through the fourteen stories linked narratives are the glistening threads of hope, connection… maybe even of love.”
Suhayl Saadi, Author: Psychoraag
“Although prominantly adorned with a blurb from the Sunday times designating it as ‘the most compelling Scottish literary debut since Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting’, Ewan Morrison’s The Last Book You Read could not be more different from Welsh’s debut both stylistically and thematically. What the texts do have in common is that both oscillate generically between constituting a novel and a collection of short stories, Trainspotting representing the former forever on the brink of irreparable self-dispersal, whereas Morrison’s narrative appears only minutely removed from aggregating into a larger whole. Similair to ambitious American film projects such as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) or Paul Haggis’s Crash (2005)…Morrison is concerned with the indispensible necessity of personal relationships, the heroic effort it takes to initiate, trust and maintain them as well as the common everyday trials inherent in being generally human in our globalised twenty first-century world…undeniably Morrison’s collection of short stories makes a contribution to contemporary world literature.”
Bertold Shoene. Going Cosmopolitan: reconstituting Scottishness in post devolution criticism. From the forthcoming book: The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature.
