Ménage

The third novel from the acclaimed author of Swung - his most ambitious and impressive book yet.

Frightening, funny, perceptive, emotional and honest... excellent

A fast-paced, poignant tale about the arrogance of youth and insane, all-consuming love

Ménage is an accomplished, often poignant novel [which] strives to go beyond corrosive irony and world-weary cynicism to recapture a sense of the possibilities of love

Few writers have what it takes to make it as proper porno-prose stars...thank goodness then for Ewan Morrison...watching his characters' fantasies (and sanity) crumble is just as interesting third time round as it's ever been before

Ewan Morrison is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories, winning a Scottish Arts Council Award in 2005. He lives in Glasgow.

It's the '90s and Dot, Saul and Owen are living together on the fringes of the Hoxton art scene - shoplifting, dole-scrounging, swapping drugs, clothes and beds. Fifteen years later they are drawn back into each other's lives but can they happily relive the past or will they rekindle the passions that nearly destroyed them?

Distance

'Incredibly compelling reading... further proving his worth as one to watch on the Scottish literary scene' - The List

Utterly compelling... On this form, Morrison is one of the finest novelists around

A transatlantic romance is brilliantly stretched to breaking point. But after a passionate week together, just how well do Tom and Meg know each other? Secrets and lies mount on two continents, as a face-to-face confrontation inevitably looms

Morrison strives to tell a new kind of love story sensitive to modern anxieties

The absorption of two lovers can make the reader feel like a gooseberry, but Morrison leaves you aching for their reunion

Corporate filmmaker Tom and a script doctor Meg have a week long affair when he visits New York. They want it to continue but he has to go home to Scotland and his son...will the distance and their weaknesses sink their romance before its begun?

Tom and Meg fall in love in New York City and spend a passionate week together before he returns to his home in Edinburgh, where they plan to reunite in eight weeks. So begins a long distance relationship filled with phone calls, phone sex, emails, text messages and waiting. 
 
Back in Scotland, Tom's eyes are opened to the mess he's been living in, with a job he despises and a girlfriend, an ex-wife and son he can no longer relate to. Meanwhile in New York, Meg throws in her job as a Hollywood script doctor, and begins writing from her heart, secretly recording every detail of their intense week together. As the weeks count down their love turns increasingly obsessive and they face traumatic choices. Does Tom really Love Meg, or is she a dream of escape? And what is Tom to Meg but increasingly a fiction? Only when she arrives they will know for sure.

Swung

The first novel by the now critically-acclaimed Scottish writer who takes the reader places they've never been before.

Glasgow writer Ewan Morrison takes on the mantle of responsibility of writing a serious book about sex and carries it off with great success. It's difficult to believe that Swung is his first novel. It boasts a narrative control and sureness of touch... that would induce envy in many more experienced novelists... Swung is a beautifully crafted, completely realised and often inspirational book. It announces Morrison as one of the most interesting and exciting voices to emerge in Scottish fiction in recent years

Genuinely groundbreaking... Morrison is one of the most gifted and accomplished writers to have emerged in recent years

The best book on sex since John Updike's Couples. Ewan Morrison's brave, dirty, utterly honest account of the psychological side of swinging is a complete delight

Though sex is its language, this is a novel about ageing and settling and messing things up again, with heart enough to make it hurt

Swung is a book of real ambition, a wide ranging exploration of human needs that starts from the most unexpected of websites

A very impressive first novel from a writer who will eventually go on to bigger and better things

What Morrison does is to re-establish an intimate bond between reader and character through a kind of sustained monologue

Morrison writes about endless sex without missing a beat, partly because his warm, witty, poignant novel is as much about 21st-century consumption as its is consummation

Seedy and undeniably erotic, this is the best book on sex since John Updike's Couples

As dirty a debut as Adam Thirlwell's brilliant Politics.... And just as funny and thought-provoking

Impotent Scottish HR employee David leaves his family and begins a relationship with an American woman named Alice. With David teetering on the brink of unemployment, Alice decides they need help, and a remedy that starts out with sexy bedtime stories ends up right in the thick of Glasgow's swinging scene. And there, in the 'Black Room' along with nine other couples, where you can feel everything but see nothing, each of them finally finds what they are looking for...

Ewan Morrison

The whole of Close Your Eyes is an admirable and intimate wrestling with the damages incurred by trying to heal, as Adorno once called modernity, "a damaged life"...anyone wanting to read a wise, emotionally literate gauge of the burdens - and blarney - of alternative living should buy it immediately.

In Close Your Eyes, Ewan Morrison carries off the compelling second-person voice brilliantly...the novel is beautifully set to a soundtrack of Rowan’s childhood.

An insightful tale of a brave new world revisited.

Beautiful. Haunting. If Ewan Morrison was a woman, Close Your Eyes would be destined for the Orange Prize shortlist.

A brave, sensitive, painful novel, Close Your Eyes is an alternative history of the last forty years, an exploration of the damage idealistic, well-intentioned parents can do to their children, and a reminder that it is sometimes the people who are absent who really fill our lives.

Told with impressive skill... a riveting read.

Close Your Eyes is an astonishing book... It takes us right to the heart of the turbulent social changes that defined our last quarter century and it is a revealing, honest, searing novel about mothers and children, about what it means to be part of a family. The story, the writing, the moral intelligence: all of it is a knock out.

Morrison is unsparing in the emotional ordeal he inflicts on both his protagonist and the reader, but his novel is always acutely and convincingly observed. It’s a telling and powerful study of the intersection between the political and personal (4 stars).

A novel that deals with post-natal depression that is both sensitive and unflinchingly honest, Morrison's story explores the bond and limits of motherhood

A fearsome read, it latches on and won’t let go.

This is more than a psychological novel – it’s a page-turning mystery too.

Intense and brilliantly sustained, this is a powerful, moving exploration of New Age life.

Fantastic…skillfully done… A rivetingly, well-told tale (4 stars).

Morrison's most accomplished book yet...a complex, thought-provoking and deeply ambitious book, and one that Morrison, now an exceedingly versatile writer, pulls off triumphantly.

Highlights include the page-turning pleasure of a well-turned plot, Morrison’s skilful crafting of character and dialogue and his confident handling of stylistic techniques.

Morally complex, emotionally resonant – Close Your Eyes is a fine, fine piece of work.

Mesmerising. Disturbing. Outstanding. Written with exquisite emotional perception, this is a tour de force from Morrison – the kind of book which comes along rarely but lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned.

Often the sense of impending disaster makes you sick with nervous tension. At other times, Morrison creates calm from the most unlikely circumstances. In a book that is somewhere between Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky and Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem, Morrison creates something both uncomfortable and beautiful to read.

This week we’re devouring Ewan Morrison’s new novel.

I found this a really gripping, moving read, brilliantly told in the first and second person

'Close Your Eyes is an astonishing book. It manages to be both clear-eyed and harsh, compassionate and just. It takes us right to the heart of the turbulent social changes that defined our last quarter century and it is a revealing, honest, searing novel about mothers and children, about what it means to be part of a family. The story, the writing, the moral intelligence: all of it is a knock out' 
Christopher Tsiolkas, author of The Slap 
 
In 1981 a mother abandoned her child and drove into the night, never to return. Her disappearance was reported in the press as a fatal road accident. Her body was never found. 
 
Thirty years later, Rowan has a child of her own. Afflicted by post-natal depression, she is convinced that she'll hurt her daughter unless she unpicks the mystery of her past, buried deep within a commune in the remote highlands of Scotland. Leaving her young family and life in London, she returns to her childhood home to find a failed utopia shrouded in secrecy. And there, with a looming cult leader, among the rites and rituals, the sacraments and ceremonies, is a single postcard dated a week after her mother's death. As she draws ever closer to the truth about her mother, she fears she might lose even herself.

Close Your Eyes

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

sectionTitle

isEnabled

anchor

anchorLabel

prhuk/featured-book

prhuk/praise-section

maxBooks

showViewMore

prhuk/books-section

hideAuthorAlert

formName

iterableDivision

iterableBrand

buttonText

description

heading

legalText

successHeading

successText

image

alignment

variation

prhuk/email-section

prhuk/series-section

prhuk/biography-section

prhuk/articles-section

prhuk-authors

The perfect gift? A Penguin Shop gift card

Ewan Morrison

Praise for Close Your Eyes

The whole of Close Your Eyes is an admirable and intimate wrestling with the damages incurred by trying to heal, as Adorno once called modernity, "a damaged life"...anyone wanting to read a wise, emotionally ...

In Close Your Eyes, Ewan Morrison carries off the compelling second-person voice brilliantly...the novel is beautifully set to a soundtrack of Rowan’s childhood.

An insightful tale of a brave new world revisited.

The whole of Close Your Eyes is an admirable and intimate wrestling with the damages incurred by trying to heal, as Adorno once called modernity, "a damaged life"...anyone wanting to read a wise, emotionally ...

In Close Your Eyes, Ewan Morrison carries off the compelling second-person voice brilliantly...the novel is beautifully set to a soundtrack of Rowan’s childhood.

An insightful tale of a brave new world revisited.

The whole of Close Your Eyes is an admirable and intimate wrestling with the damages incurred by trying to heal, as Adorno once called modernity, "a damaged life"...anyone wanting to read a wise, emotionally ...

In Close Your Eyes, Ewan Morrison carries off the compelling second-person voice brilliantly...the novel is beautifully set to a soundtrack of Rowan’s childhood.

An insightful tale of a brave new world revisited.

Books by Ewan Morrison

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter