The Echoes
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3.9 • 28 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
‘This is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before… a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious.’ – OBSERVER *Books to Look Out For 2024*
Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him.
In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story, but the past refuses to stay hidden. It finds expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, the details of their lives she never knew and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.
Both a celebration and an autopsy of a relationship, spanning multiple generations and set between rural Australia and London, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, stories and who has the right to tell them. It asks what of our past we can shrug off and what is fixed forever, echoing down through the years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ghost of a woman's boyfriend attempts to piece together the mysteries of her life, in the elegant latest from Wyld (All the Birds, Singing). The reader first meets Max, who was a London university professor, shortly after his death. The cause is unknown to him, and until now, so was the existence of the afterlife: "I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem," he wryly notes. His chapters, titled "After," alternate with "Before" chapters narrated by his bartender girlfriend, Hannah, in which she reveals to the reader that she's keeping secrets from him, such as a recent abortion, and by third-person "Then" chapters, which delve into Hannah's childhood in rural Australia and eventually reveal the painful reason why she left that country and refuses to introduce her family to Max. The intricate structure and lyrical language rewards close reading, and Wyld skillfully balances the dark subject matter with moments of levity. This unsettling novel is tough to shake.
