This novel is what I call a ‘slow burner’; one that takes a while for you to connect with, but when you do, the investment in continuing is rewarded.
It starts with a ghost (Max) who inhabits the apartment that he and his girlfriend, Hannah, share in London. Max is a bewildered spirit. He knows he must be dead but doesn’t know how he died or why he is hovering around Hannah and the flat. As he watches Hannah in her grief, he realises he didn’t know her at all.
Hannah harbours secrets that were invisible to Max in life, but as the story unfolds, her tragic past is revealed.
The story spans The Echoes, a rural property in Australia where Hannah grew up, to the flat in London. The Echoes has a dark past, a place where ‘stolen’ indigenous girls were taken and never left. The flat in London is around the corner from where her grandmother lived as a child. Hannah never understood why she left London, until after Max dies.
Wylde tells the stories of the people Hannah grew up with. It’s a multi-generational tale of trauma, love, abuse, and survival; one that tore Hannah’s family apart and led her to Max.
Wyld’s clever use of timelines, before, after, and present, and her complex understanding of character, yield a dark but brilliant tale. Key characters reveal their life events through their own point of view, each with a connection to Hannah.
The Echoes is a taut and emotional read but the ending turns full circle in a surprising and pleasing way.
Reviewed by Sue Stanbridge
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Evie Wyld was born in London and grew up in Australia and South London. She studied creative writing at Bath Spa and Goldsmiths University. Her first novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, the Commonwealth Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award. In 2013 she was included on Granta Magazine’s once a decade Best of Young British Novelists list.
Her second novel All the Birds, Singing won the Miles Franklin Award, the Encore Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award and longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.
She runs Review, a small independent bookshop in Peckham, south London.
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