Ewan Morrison
Ewan Morrison is a multi-award-winning novelist, screenwriter and essayist. His novel, Nina X, won the Saltire Society Scottish Fiction Book of the Year and is currently being developed as a feature film. He’s previously won the Scottish Book of the Year Fiction Prize (2013) and the Glenfiddich Scottish Writer of the Year (2012). His first feature film, an adaptation, was released in five territories in 2016, and was a finalist for four international film awards. American Blackout, a feature length docudrama co-written by Morrison reached 28 million viewers. Morrison has also been nominated for three Scottish BAFTAs. His latest novel, How to Survive Everything was published in March 2021. Photo credit: Paul Harkins
How to Survive Everything
Read an extract
Longlisted for the 2021 McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year
My name is Haley Cooper Crowe and I am in lockdown in a remote location I can’t tell you about.
Haley and Ben live with their mother. But their dad has good reason to believe there’s a new, much deadlier pandemic coming. He’s determined to get them to the safety of his lockdown hideaway. NOW. The only problem is, there is no way their mother will go along with this plan.
Kidnapped by their father, they have no contact with the outside world. Can they survive? Will they save their mother? This is one teenage girl’s survival guide for negotiating the collapse of everything she knows – including her family and sanity.
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Listen to Ewan Morrison’s playlist of Songs to Survive Everything.
REVIEWS OF How to Survive Everything
"Enthralling" The Bookseller
“This is an absolutely brilliant read.” Lucy Mangan
"I loved everything about [this book]... the voice, the world, the humour, the darkness … Read now, thank me later..." Antonia Senior
"A brilliant, intriguing, harrowing, illuminating story." Tim Minchin
“This is a seriously excellent novel.” Irvine Welsh
“A complex, thought-provoking drama about fake news, real fears and frayed family ties … both exciting and terrifying … a bold and compelling book by a writer whose creative risks continue to pay huge dividends.” Malcom Forbes, Herald
"A terrific and gripping story… a masterclass in storytelling … echoes of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield … Haley is a triumph … often very funny … It’s unusual for a dystopian novel to be rich in humanity, but this one is. … Morrison has been recognized as the best or certainly most interesting Scottish novelist of his generation, and this is the best book he has yet written." Alan Massie, The Scotsman
"I wasn’t sure there could be a great pandemic novel. Here it is." Ian Rankin
"The novel’s ingenuity is in keeping the reader on tiptoes … The funniest thing about this book is that it is funny … the ways in which divorce, depression and disaster can all be weaponised make this a skewed comedy of manners ― as if The Good Life had been rewritten by George A. Romero … it takes a novelist as humane and wry as Morrison to find in [survivalism] a very weird redemption." Stuart Kelly, Spectator
“How To Survive Everything is a gritty and (tragically) cool novel. The collision of a broken family and a global pandemic, it reads as a survival guide and feels like (is) a warning.” David Shields (via Twitter)
"Urgent and exciting, harnessing our current global anxiety with a beautifully observed family drama." Atom Egoyan
“Terrifying … a terrifically written thriller that puts a very contemporary dysfunctional family at the heart of a very contemporary dystopian reality.” Lynda Obst, Producer of Interstellar