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Your next favorite book
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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.
"[E]legant...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." —Publishers Weekly
"Literary fiction at its best, expertly blending humor and despair. Her prose is at times heartbreaking, at times hilarious." ―Booklist
"Compulsively readable...The wit of Evie Wyld is on sparkling display...Wyld is in complete control of each timeframe and narrative vantage point...She is an expert at withholding information until it can be delivered with maximum impact." ―Financial Times (UK)
"Wyld has always excelled at tension and pace, and the scattered puzzle pieces drop into place with both a feeling of horror and a strange kind of satisfaction...Yet as well as terror The Echoes is also suffused with love...It is also—and this is important—a deeply funny book...The last, lingering voices in the novel hint at healing—and at hope." ―The Guardian (UK)
"The Echoes is a cleverly crafted novel...A masterly achievement, a work of skill and subtle empathy that really earns our attention." ―The Sunday Times (UK)
"Unsettling, vivid, and beautifully written." ―Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
"The Echoes is a gorgeous, wise, furious meditation on the ways in which we carry both love and pain across decades and hemispheres. Each new layer is a revelation of compassion and understanding. Wyld is brilliant on girlhood, on grief, on intimacy's terrible costs and its funny, messy grace. This is a jewel of a novel." ―Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest
"A stunning, immersive work of sharp prose, weaving intergenerational trauma and a ghost story and the complexities of love and families. Wyld gets better with each novel." ―Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations
This information about The Echoes was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Fiona Fletcher
Evie Wyld is the award-winning author of four novels and one graphic novel. She has won the Betty Trask Prize, Miles Franklin Literary Award, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the European Union Prize for Literature. In 2013 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and she lives in London.
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