Book Talk

Close Your Eyes, Ewan Morrison's award-winning fourth novel, is the subject of our panel's scrutiny in this month's Book Talk. Moderated by Danny Scott, guests Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and cultural critic and New Writers Awardee Lucy Rochester peel away the layers of this onion-like work, searching for the soft centre of this complex book, which tackles a wide range of topics including depression, parenthood, New Age ideals and deep-seated narcissism. The book follows a woman named Rowan, who was abandoned by her mother by the roadside some thirty years earlier. Now a mother herself and grappling with post-natal depression, Rowan leaves her own young family in London and travels to the remote commune in Scotland where she grew up. Paranoid that she'll repeat her mother's mistakes, Rowan delves into her past and tries to get to the bottom of her mother's disappearance. Find out what our panellists had to say about the story and its themes (not to mention its rather