The Echoes
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning novelist, a ravishing new novel set between London and rural Australia, both a love story and a ghost story
Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he is still here, he watches his girlfriend, Hannah, lost in grief in the apartment they shared and begins to realize how much of her life was invisible to him.
In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah was haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seemed to offer the potential of a fresh new chapter, but the past refused to stay hidden. It found expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.
Both a celebration and an autopsy of a relationship, and spanning multiple generations, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, motherhood and sisterhood, secrets and who has the right to reveal them—what of our past can be cast away 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.
