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The Echoes
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 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 can we shrug off and what is fixed forever, echoing down through the years.
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First published August 1, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 571 reviews
January 17, 2025
Max has died… he now haunts the London flat he shared with Hannah, his Australian girlfriend.
Hannah came to England and lives near a home that her grandmother once owned.. Hannah left a tumultuous family life growing up in Australia.
The story jumps from AFTER ..Max being trapped as a ghost in the flat watching Hannah… to BEFORE…Hannah’s life story growing up Down Under.
The ghost Max does not know how he died or a big secret Hannah had kept from him… he will find all this out by the end…
There is a great ending to this story … offering healing and hope.
Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf for the ARC!
Hannah came to England and lives near a home that her grandmother once owned.. Hannah left a tumultuous family life growing up in Australia.
The story jumps from AFTER ..Max being trapped as a ghost in the flat watching Hannah… to BEFORE…Hannah’s life story growing up Down Under.
The ghost Max does not know how he died or a big secret Hannah had kept from him… he will find all this out by the end…
There is a great ending to this story … offering healing and hope.
Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf for the ARC!
August 8, 2024
This is a book that never quite landed with me. It opens with the voice of a ghost who doesn't know how he died or why he's still in the flat where he lived with his girlfriend, and the references to Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply felt over-used.
The narrative switches between Before, After and Then; between Australia and London, between past and the future. I felt there were too many perspectives, too many points of view, and the structure felt messy rather than layered.
At heart, this deals with 'echoes' of secrets, grief and loss in personal life and Australia as a colonial nation. There are family secrets to be uncovered and pains to heal. To be honest, it all felt a bit overdone and repetitive, even derivative. And that ghost was just maudlin.
I've read and liked Wyld before, finding her a powerful, surprising and edgy writer - this one fell flat for me.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley
The narrative switches between Before, After and Then; between Australia and London, between past and the future. I felt there were too many perspectives, too many points of view, and the structure felt messy rather than layered.
At heart, this deals with 'echoes' of secrets, grief and loss in personal life and Australia as a colonial nation. There are family secrets to be uncovered and pains to heal. To be honest, it all felt a bit overdone and repetitive, even derivative. And that ghost was just maudlin.
I've read and liked Wyld before, finding her a powerful, surprising and edgy writer - this one fell flat for me.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley
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May 30, 2024This is so beautifully written, unsettling and vivid. Max is dead but moves through the house where his girlfriend, Hannah and he lived, watching her as she grieves and time leaps on without him. We also learn about Hannah and Max when he was alive, and all the things she kept from him. And then we travel further back to when Hannah lived in Australia and the trauma her family wrought upon her. It returns full circle at the end in a very lovely way.
Weirdly this has many similar elements as The Yield which I just read for my book group, but I enjoyed The Echoes so much more.
Weirdly this has many similar elements as The Yield which I just read for my book group, but I enjoyed The Echoes so much more.
September 3, 2024
(2.5) I can see what Wyld was trying to do here. It's a powerful message: hurt people hurt others; one trauma begets another in a generational pattern. Escaping is nigh on impossible. (And it's not just a white working-class thing. The land itself holds these histories: The Echoes is .) But this novel is just full of misery. . It doesn't let up. In the midst of this, what on earth is Max's role? What is a literal ghost supposed to bring to a story about haunting memories? Comic relief? For me this mostly didn't work despite the care taken over character development and plot reveals.
April 26, 2024
Evie Wyld can really write. She knows her timelines and her characters and builds her story to a taut and intense and emotional read. There’s always darkness and violence in her books but she doesn’t describe it, she shows the effects on her characters and how they cope and somehow get on with their lives. The main character in this book is Hannah, an Australian woman living in a flat in London with her boyfriend Max. The flat is near a house where her grandmother lived before moving to Australia. The other major narrative is the ghost of Max in the flat (Surprisingly it works here, dead narrators don’t always work for me). That’s the ‘After’ thread, then there’s ‘Before’ about Max and Hannah’s relationship, and ‘Then’ set in Hannah’s childhood growing up in a house in ‘The Echoes’ on land where there’s also a schoolhouse that trained Aboriginal girls taken from their families. (Yes, there’s a graveyard, definitely not good vibes here). A powerful read.
August 8, 2025
Sometimes it felt like I’d read this book before. I hadn’t, of course, but it seemed pretty reminiscent of other Australia-based books I’d read. (In other words, it didn’t feel very fresh or original.) It’s possible that may have had some small bearing on my rating.
Much of the book was about the effects of child abuse and generational trauma—really serious stuff and nothing you’d want to joke around about. But then in comes this Max character—who is now a ghost—and, despite Wyld giving him the role of “narrator” he seems hugely out of place. Everything about him seems to exist solely to lighten the mood, but is that really necessary? He’s apparently haunting Hannah, but WHY, then, does he continue to stay on, long after she’s left? In fact, he’s STILL there 50 years later when she returns with her grand-niece who'll live in the flat while she attends University. So, we're to understand that Hannah owned the flat all those many years in between? It seems the ONLY reason Max is still there is to see Hannah again, but what was he meant to be doing there for 50 long years? It just didn't work for me!👎
The story about Hannah was an interesting one and it could have continued along any number of story lines. But bringing in a boyfriend to “haunt” her and make stupid jokes seemed a big distraction and a huge FAIL. IMO, Wyld could have used a third-person narrator to much better effect.
“Leave–the–ghosts–of–the–past–in–the–past” 3.5-stars ⭐⭐⭐
Much of the book was about the effects of child abuse and generational trauma—really serious stuff and nothing you’d want to joke around about. But then in comes this Max character—who is now a ghost—and, despite Wyld giving him the role of “narrator” he seems hugely out of place. Everything about him seems to exist solely to lighten the mood, but is that really necessary? He’s apparently haunting Hannah, but WHY, then, does he continue to stay on, long after she’s left? In fact, he’s STILL there 50 years later when she returns with her grand-niece who'll live in the flat while she attends University. So, we're to understand that Hannah owned the flat all those many years in between? It seems the ONLY reason Max is still there is to see Hannah again, but what was he meant to be doing there for 50 long years? It just didn't work for me!👎
The story about Hannah was an interesting one and it could have continued along any number of story lines. But bringing in a boyfriend to “haunt” her and make stupid jokes seemed a big distraction and a huge FAIL. IMO, Wyld could have used a third-person narrator to much better effect.
“Leave–the–ghosts–of–the–past–in–the–past” 3.5-stars ⭐⭐⭐
July 30, 2024
A beautifully written complex novel about secrets and trauma set in Australia and London. As you go back and forth in time and place, and get different perspectives from various characters, all secrets from the past are slowly being unfolded. Intense, impressive and absolutely brilliant!
Thanks you Jonathan Cape and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
Thanks you Jonathan Cape and Netgalley UK for the ARC.
May 18, 2025
Closed the book, said, “Ugh,” and slammed it on my table.
October 7, 2024
The Echoes is the fifth novel by award-winning Australian author, Evie Wyld. Max, the less-favoured son of James and Emily, teaches writing at a London university. He has never believed in ghosts, but now he is one. Stuck in the flat he shared with his girlfriend, Hannah, ignorant of how he died and, mystified as to what is keeping him there, he tries, with mixed success, to make his presence felt.
Hannah escaped her life in rural Western Australia to live in a flat in London, in view of the place she has felt homesick for, ever since she first saw a photograph of her maternal grandmother, Natalia, standing in front of Natalia’s grandfather’s Barcombe Avenue house. In London, she can become someone else. Questions from Max about her family are evaded; letters from her mother are ignored; secrets and lies cover things she doesn’t want to remember.
Kerry and Piers bring up their daughters Rach and Hannah on their goat farm, a corner of a place called The Echoes, near Wilma, WA, where once stolen children were trained in the schoolhouse by Francis Manningtree’s mother. Uncle Tone and his girlfriend Melissa are there too. Piers might be the only one who doesn’t have a past he wants to forget, the only one who doesn’t have memories and bad feelings he buries in the dirt.
Mrs Manningtree would say “Yes it was, of course, hard for a child to be taken from its family, but it was all for the good. Imagine not having a roof, a bed, canned food to eat, a lavatory to sit on. They were different, the Blacks, they didn’t feel the same about their families, they got over things quicker, were used to it. Often when they arrived they didn’t even know how to wash themselves, poor things, basic hygiene escaped them” but Francis is no longer convinced. His second son acts to effect a rescue.
Why Hannah meticulously makes multiple cups of coffee but never drinks them, why she paints their flat in dark colours, why she keeps a small cube of broken green glass, mysteries to which Max may never learn the answer, even if the patient reader eventually does.
Why Kerry bakes inedible cakes and jam tarts, why Anthony eats them, why Kerry downplays her cleverness, her sharpness, her seriousness, with silliness, are things that Piers doesn’t understand. Anthony does, though: “She is hiding herself for safety. Rach, a carbon copy of how Kerry used to be. She’s funny and sharp and tough.”
Melissa does, too: “they are both pretending at something – just like a child’s tea party. They’ve both reached for something beyond them and in order to keep up the pretence they have to be different people, so that when truth comes looking it won’t recognise them.”
Multiple narrative voices, two in the first person, relate a story over three timelines that are clearly delineated. The title could apply to the place where Hannah and her sister grew up, but there are lots of echoes within the story, and repetitions. The reader might wonder if victimhood of child sexual abuse is inherited, not through the genes, but an echo of lived experience. Might there be an identifiable traumatic cause up the ancestral line?
Wyld sets her scenes with evocative descriptive prose; her characters, multi-faceted and complex, can’t help drawing the reader’s empathy. Moving and powerful.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Random House UK/Vintage.
Hannah escaped her life in rural Western Australia to live in a flat in London, in view of the place she has felt homesick for, ever since she first saw a photograph of her maternal grandmother, Natalia, standing in front of Natalia’s grandfather’s Barcombe Avenue house. In London, she can become someone else. Questions from Max about her family are evaded; letters from her mother are ignored; secrets and lies cover things she doesn’t want to remember.
Kerry and Piers bring up their daughters Rach and Hannah on their goat farm, a corner of a place called The Echoes, near Wilma, WA, where once stolen children were trained in the schoolhouse by Francis Manningtree’s mother. Uncle Tone and his girlfriend Melissa are there too. Piers might be the only one who doesn’t have a past he wants to forget, the only one who doesn’t have memories and bad feelings he buries in the dirt.
Mrs Manningtree would say “Yes it was, of course, hard for a child to be taken from its family, but it was all for the good. Imagine not having a roof, a bed, canned food to eat, a lavatory to sit on. They were different, the Blacks, they didn’t feel the same about their families, they got over things quicker, were used to it. Often when they arrived they didn’t even know how to wash themselves, poor things, basic hygiene escaped them” but Francis is no longer convinced. His second son acts to effect a rescue.
Why Hannah meticulously makes multiple cups of coffee but never drinks them, why she paints their flat in dark colours, why she keeps a small cube of broken green glass, mysteries to which Max may never learn the answer, even if the patient reader eventually does.
Why Kerry bakes inedible cakes and jam tarts, why Anthony eats them, why Kerry downplays her cleverness, her sharpness, her seriousness, with silliness, are things that Piers doesn’t understand. Anthony does, though: “She is hiding herself for safety. Rach, a carbon copy of how Kerry used to be. She’s funny and sharp and tough.”
Melissa does, too: “they are both pretending at something – just like a child’s tea party. They’ve both reached for something beyond them and in order to keep up the pretence they have to be different people, so that when truth comes looking it won’t recognise them.”
Multiple narrative voices, two in the first person, relate a story over three timelines that are clearly delineated. The title could apply to the place where Hannah and her sister grew up, but there are lots of echoes within the story, and repetitions. The reader might wonder if victimhood of child sexual abuse is inherited, not through the genes, but an echo of lived experience. Might there be an identifiable traumatic cause up the ancestral line?
Wyld sets her scenes with evocative descriptive prose; her characters, multi-faceted and complex, can’t help drawing the reader’s empathy. Moving and powerful.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Random House UK/Vintage.
December 17, 2024
“I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem.”
From the first sentence, Evie Wyld signals to her readers that her new novel may be an untraditional ghost story. Indeed, our first narrator is Max, a creative writing tutor, who died (we don’t know how) while cohabitating with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah.
Max is a powerless ghost, trapped in Hannah’s London flat, but very quickly, we understand that the book is not about Max; rather, it is about ghosts that are far more insidious and poisonous. The story reveals itself in fragmentary vignettes where the truth is very gradually (and never totally) revealed. The “before” chapters, narrated by Hannah, are focused on the few years before Max’s death and the “after” chapters – Max’s chapters – show him spectrally viewing how Hannah held up afterward. These are woven in with “then” chapters, narrated in third person from the vantage point of Hannah’s disturbing Australian childhood.
And herein lie the true ghosts. Hannah and her family live within a stone’s throw of a former reform school, where young aboriginal children, forcibly separated from their parents, succumbed to or were broken by colonial violence. In this outback village, the past continues to haunt the present. The legacy of generational abuse also ghosts the present, as each generation of Hannah’s family falls victim to drink, drugs, rape, and abuse.
While alive – and even after death – Max has a hard time making head nor tail of Hannah, who is secretive, self-harming, indecisive, and irretrievably broken. Dark hints abound that refer to pet goats, a very damaged Uncle Tone, and destructive family secrets and interactions.
Everyone is either trapped or affected by the ghosts – or, one might say, echoes – that reverberate through the novel. A cup of coffee, a slice of goat cheese, a photo, the elements of everyday life, have a way of becoming something that stands for more.
The novel, by its very structure, keeps readers off-balance with its jumbled timelines and narrations and that, in turn, can be interpreted as brilliant or, at times, unfulfilling. In a myriad of ways, the book explores what we keep hidden, what we unwittingly reveal, and how we try to redefine ourselves. It is the type of quality that I expect from a Knopf-published book, and I owe Knopf a big thanks for allowing me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review
From the first sentence, Evie Wyld signals to her readers that her new novel may be an untraditional ghost story. Indeed, our first narrator is Max, a creative writing tutor, who died (we don’t know how) while cohabitating with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah.
Max is a powerless ghost, trapped in Hannah’s London flat, but very quickly, we understand that the book is not about Max; rather, it is about ghosts that are far more insidious and poisonous. The story reveals itself in fragmentary vignettes where the truth is very gradually (and never totally) revealed. The “before” chapters, narrated by Hannah, are focused on the few years before Max’s death and the “after” chapters – Max’s chapters – show him spectrally viewing how Hannah held up afterward. These are woven in with “then” chapters, narrated in third person from the vantage point of Hannah’s disturbing Australian childhood.
And herein lie the true ghosts. Hannah and her family live within a stone’s throw of a former reform school, where young aboriginal children, forcibly separated from their parents, succumbed to or were broken by colonial violence. In this outback village, the past continues to haunt the present. The legacy of generational abuse also ghosts the present, as each generation of Hannah’s family falls victim to drink, drugs, rape, and abuse.
While alive – and even after death – Max has a hard time making head nor tail of Hannah, who is secretive, self-harming, indecisive, and irretrievably broken. Dark hints abound that refer to pet goats, a very damaged Uncle Tone, and destructive family secrets and interactions.
Everyone is either trapped or affected by the ghosts – or, one might say, echoes – that reverberate through the novel. A cup of coffee, a slice of goat cheese, a photo, the elements of everyday life, have a way of becoming something that stands for more.
The novel, by its very structure, keeps readers off-balance with its jumbled timelines and narrations and that, in turn, can be interpreted as brilliant or, at times, unfulfilling. In a myriad of ways, the book explores what we keep hidden, what we unwittingly reveal, and how we try to redefine ourselves. It is the type of quality that I expect from a Knopf-published book, and I owe Knopf a big thanks for allowing me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review
September 7, 2024
3.5★
I'm really happy to have finally read something by celebrated author, Evie Wyld. While this book didn't exactly set me on fire, I'm excited to know I now have a few others to dive into, and what to expect when I get there. Still, I liked The Echoes well enough, despite it's difficult subject matter, but right to the end I couldn't help but ask myself what was the point of Max's ghost (other than as a narrative device).
The audiobook experience was good, but there were one or two things I would have liked to re-visit to make sure I understood what was going on, and obviously that would have been easier if I'd read a text edition.
I'm really happy to have finally read something by celebrated author, Evie Wyld. While this book didn't exactly set me on fire, I'm excited to know I now have a few others to dive into, and what to expect when I get there. Still, I liked The Echoes well enough, despite it's difficult subject matter, but right to the end I couldn't help but ask myself what was the point of Max's ghost (other than as a narrative device).
The audiobook experience was good, but there were one or two things I would have liked to re-visit to make sure I understood what was going on, and obviously that would have been easier if I'd read a text edition.
August 5, 2024
3,5
The Echoes is about the places we live in and how the things that happened there in the past still reverberate in the present.
Hannah has left her native Australia and now lives with her boyfriend Max in London, who dies in the opening chapter but lives on as a ghost. Via flashbacks we find out Hannah's secrets and why she never wanted Max to meet her parents.
I had not read Evie Wyld before, but quite enjoyed this accessible novel.
The Echoes is about the places we live in and how the things that happened there in the past still reverberate in the present.
Hannah has left her native Australia and now lives with her boyfriend Max in London, who dies in the opening chapter but lives on as a ghost. Via flashbacks we find out Hannah's secrets and why she never wanted Max to meet her parents.
I had not read Evie Wyld before, but quite enjoyed this accessible novel.
February 11, 2025
this one unexpectedly drew me in and i ended up reading most of it in one day! part family history, part relationship autopsy, and part ghost story, the echoes has a lot of moving parts that work together to make a compelling read.
we begin by following max, a recently deceased writer who is now a ghost, stuck in the apartment he shared with his longtime girlfriend hannah. hannah’s family life has been a mystery to max, and the chapters alternate between max’s perspective as a ghost and hannah’s perspective before max passed away, as well as a chapter from the perspective of each of hannah’s family members during her childhood. sounds like a lot, but once you settle into the novel, this puzzling-together of hannah’s life becomes a really compelling way to move the story forward.
i thought hannah’s complicated family history was the most gripping part of the story. max’s role in hannah’s life and the plot dealing with their relationship didn’t feel as fleshed out to me, and max didn’t feel like as strong of a character compared to hannah and her family. i was unsure how i would feel about the ghost element, and despite it being the weaker plot, i thought it was a very effective device to demonstrate how you can never fully know someone.
the book deals with some heavy topics, most notably the stolen generations survivors of australia and how hannah’s family was living on stolen land. this was my first time reading about this topic and i’d be curious to hear opinions on how this was handled from indigenous folks. would be really interested in reading more about the topic!
thank you to knopf and netgalley for the early copy of this book, out 2/18!
we begin by following max, a recently deceased writer who is now a ghost, stuck in the apartment he shared with his longtime girlfriend hannah. hannah’s family life has been a mystery to max, and the chapters alternate between max’s perspective as a ghost and hannah’s perspective before max passed away, as well as a chapter from the perspective of each of hannah’s family members during her childhood. sounds like a lot, but once you settle into the novel, this puzzling-together of hannah’s life becomes a really compelling way to move the story forward.
i thought hannah’s complicated family history was the most gripping part of the story. max’s role in hannah’s life and the plot dealing with their relationship didn’t feel as fleshed out to me, and max didn’t feel like as strong of a character compared to hannah and her family. i was unsure how i would feel about the ghost element, and despite it being the weaker plot, i thought it was a very effective device to demonstrate how you can never fully know someone.
the book deals with some heavy topics, most notably the stolen generations survivors of australia and how hannah’s family was living on stolen land. this was my first time reading about this topic and i’d be curious to hear opinions on how this was handled from indigenous folks. would be really interested in reading more about the topic!
thank you to knopf and netgalley for the early copy of this book, out 2/18!
May 24, 2025
We are all haunted by our lives and experiences. . .In this eerie read that truth is confirmed page after page in the rotating narratives and timelines of Max, Hannah and others who inhabit their living spaces, relationships and experiences together. What remains after they don't are The Echoes. . .and it is profoundly true of our lives as well. As one reads this, eyes may wander and minds wonder. . .will I haunt this place? will my echoes remain?
Not a comfortable, restful read, this. In the course of serving historical re-evaluation and awareness difficult topics herein may challenge readers with sensitive and disturbing scenes.
(Bonus in the Acknowledgements: "Thanks to the woman who haunted our flat - I'm sure you were just trying to help.")
*A sincere thank you to Evie Wyld, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review independently.* #TheEchoes #NetGalley 25|52:31d
Not a comfortable, restful read, this. In the course of serving historical re-evaluation and awareness difficult topics herein may challenge readers with sensitive and disturbing scenes.
(Bonus in the Acknowledgements: "Thanks to the woman who haunted our flat - I'm sure you were just trying to help.")
*A sincere thank you to Evie Wyld, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review independently.* #TheEchoes #NetGalley 25|52:31d
September 3, 2024
There were poignant parts but on the whole it's puzzling to see the ghost of a man forced to float around someone who wasn't particularly pleasant to them.
April 6, 2025
okay but like. what was the point of the ghost.
October 21, 2024
This book was an interesting examination of grief and regret. It was subtly told but held my interest all the way to the end.
August 31, 2024
A very clever novel. A clear story narrated by different characters in their own chapters. The timeline of the novel goes back and forward in time, in chapters titled Before, After and Then. Bouncing back and forward like an Echo. Echoing out from a plain in Australia called The Echos where sound can be heard for miles though the vast country. There are Echoes of the Indigenous people and the children taken from their parents and put in a "school" becoming The Stolen Generation, that many didn't survive and are buried in the "school" graveyard. There are other echoes of generational trauma told mainly through the daughters lives starting with their immigration to Australia of the grandmother as a child from England.
A well told easy to read novel. The ghost of a loved partner also echoes in a flat in England observing time passing.
Terrific literary fiction, although, incest is never a topic that I'm that keen to read about. It's done well in this case.
A novel that should do well in next year's literary prizes.
A well told easy to read novel. The ghost of a loved partner also echoes in a flat in England observing time passing.
Terrific literary fiction, although, incest is never a topic that I'm that keen to read about. It's done well in this case.
A novel that should do well in next year's literary prizes.
March 31, 2025
The Echoes is a sad story about intergenerational trauma set in England and Australia. There are three primary rotating timelines, along with chapters dedicated to particular individuals:
• “After” is set in a London flat after Max has died. His ghost is observing Hannah, his would-be finance, as she grieves for him.
• “Before” follows the relationship between Max and Hannah, along with some of their friends, prior to Max’s death.
• “Then” is set in Australia on the family’s goat farm during Hannah’s youth. It focuses on the many traumas the family members experienced and references tragedies at a nearby school for indigenous children.
The echoes of the title refer to the reverberation of trauma through the generations. There is quite a bit of disturbing content. The voice of the ghost is surprisingly effective, and it also inserts a tiny bit of relief into a bleak story. It points out that physically changing locations cannot undo psychological damage. I ended with mixed feelings. It contains elegant prose but does not flow very well. There are other books that better and more fully address the plight of the indigenous people of Australia. It is most effective in depicting the difficulties in truly knowing another person and the importance of trust in lasting relationships.
• “After” is set in a London flat after Max has died. His ghost is observing Hannah, his would-be finance, as she grieves for him.
• “Before” follows the relationship between Max and Hannah, along with some of their friends, prior to Max’s death.
• “Then” is set in Australia on the family’s goat farm during Hannah’s youth. It focuses on the many traumas the family members experienced and references tragedies at a nearby school for indigenous children.
The echoes of the title refer to the reverberation of trauma through the generations. There is quite a bit of disturbing content. The voice of the ghost is surprisingly effective, and it also inserts a tiny bit of relief into a bleak story. It points out that physically changing locations cannot undo psychological damage. I ended with mixed feelings. It contains elegant prose but does not flow very well. There are other books that better and more fully address the plight of the indigenous people of Australia. It is most effective in depicting the difficulties in truly knowing another person and the importance of trust in lasting relationships.
October 3, 2025
3.5 stars rounded down
I picked up The Echoes as part of my “Haunting the Narrative October” TBR thinking that the synopsis reminded me of the film A Ghost Story, a film that still continues to haunt me years after I first watched it. While the book did have a smattering of the existential afterlife dread I had been anticipating, our ghostly paramour is very much a side character in his own haunting. Rather, The Echoes is primarily a story about how intergenerational trauma haunts the living. The story instead focuses on Hannah, the woman left to pick up the pieces in the wake of her boyfriend’s untimely death. When we meet her, she holds a poisoned well of family secrets inside her chest, and is clearly cracking under the weight of it all. Max the ghost is deployed more as a harbinger of levity to break up the bleak experiences of Hannah’s rotted family tree, rather than a spectral presence that drives the story forward.
The way Hannah’s family history is unfurled, involves multiple POVs shared across multiple timelines identified as “Then”, “Before”, and “After”. This proved occasionally hard to follow, but wasn’t cumbersome enough to really take away from my reading experience. Where things did lose a bit of steam for me however, is in the novel’s tendency to over explain things to the reader. There were multiple instances where a particular development had been made abundantly clear without being explicitly said aloud, only for Wyld to then explicitly state what was already quite obvious. To provide examples of this would spoil the story’s big climactic reveal, but suffice it to say that they pertain to Hannah’s tragic family history she struggled so desperately to suppress.
Despite my quibbles with a lack of trust in the reader, the story is devastating, and successfully portrays the blast radius subsumed by intergenerational trauma. The prose is gorgeous and evocative, transporting between the depths of the Australian wilds known simply as The Echoes, and a damp, moth-infested flat in central London.
This is a book I think would really resonate with fans of Tiffany McDaniel, expansive in scope and its exploration of trauma. For me though, I struggled to piece together a need for Max and his ghostly narrative, when the true focus was really Hannah reckoning with her past quite separate and apart from losing Max. I would have preferred a more focussed, smaller scale story of grief and the limbo of the afterlife, but alas this is not that book.
I picked up The Echoes as part of my “Haunting the Narrative October” TBR thinking that the synopsis reminded me of the film A Ghost Story, a film that still continues to haunt me years after I first watched it. While the book did have a smattering of the existential afterlife dread I had been anticipating, our ghostly paramour is very much a side character in his own haunting. Rather, The Echoes is primarily a story about how intergenerational trauma haunts the living. The story instead focuses on Hannah, the woman left to pick up the pieces in the wake of her boyfriend’s untimely death. When we meet her, she holds a poisoned well of family secrets inside her chest, and is clearly cracking under the weight of it all. Max the ghost is deployed more as a harbinger of levity to break up the bleak experiences of Hannah’s rotted family tree, rather than a spectral presence that drives the story forward.
The way Hannah’s family history is unfurled, involves multiple POVs shared across multiple timelines identified as “Then”, “Before”, and “After”. This proved occasionally hard to follow, but wasn’t cumbersome enough to really take away from my reading experience. Where things did lose a bit of steam for me however, is in the novel’s tendency to over explain things to the reader. There were multiple instances where a particular development had been made abundantly clear without being explicitly said aloud, only for Wyld to then explicitly state what was already quite obvious. To provide examples of this would spoil the story’s big climactic reveal, but suffice it to say that they pertain to Hannah’s tragic family history she struggled so desperately to suppress.
Despite my quibbles with a lack of trust in the reader, the story is devastating, and successfully portrays the blast radius subsumed by intergenerational trauma. The prose is gorgeous and evocative, transporting between the depths of the Australian wilds known simply as The Echoes, and a damp, moth-infested flat in central London.
This is a book I think would really resonate with fans of Tiffany McDaniel, expansive in scope and its exploration of trauma. For me though, I struggled to piece together a need for Max and his ghostly narrative, when the true focus was really Hannah reckoning with her past quite separate and apart from losing Max. I would have preferred a more focussed, smaller scale story of grief and the limbo of the afterlife, but alas this is not that book.
April 26, 2025
I’m in shambles
March 26, 2025
Deeply unsettling and tormented.
July 14, 2024
Okay, I need to be honest upfront here. I would read a book on clothes folding if Evie Wyld wrote it, so I was thrilled and grateful to get an ARC of her latest book.
EW first came to my attention when she was featured in Granta's ten-yearly Best of Young British Writers (young meaning <40). The definition of British has flexed over the years, but Wyld has called the UK her home, running a bookstore in Peckham, for many years now. My first whole work of hers was All the Birds Singing, which is unusual and haunting. It also launched her into wider attention when it won her the Miles Franklin, Australia's top literary award.
Wyld followed this up with The Bass Rock which won her the Stella prize, Australia's equivalent to the UK's Orange prize for women. And yet... for me, it is Wyld's first novel that has lived with me the longest. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice has a troubled male protagonist where all the action is in Australia. This is her least discussed book, and I'm not sure why.
Okay, let's talk about The Echoes. If you enjoy EW's writing, you can stop here and just go and order it. If you enjoyed the tripartite plot structure and the ghostly element of The Bass Rock, likewise. No need to muck around, just do yourself a favour.
The Echoes has an elegant structure, with the sections more clearly identified for those who found TBR's a little hard to follow. We have After, where Max is a ghost hovering around the edges of Hannah's post-Max life; Before sections cover their lives together when he was alive. Then, flips back to Australia to Hannah's family life when she was a pre-teen. The Then sections also have their own haunting element whereby the characters live on the site of an old school used to 'educate' stolen indigenous children. This sequence is tied up with a coda piece named for a particular character, and is about their experiences and inner thoughts. Like a musical composition, this pattern is repeated, progressing through different players until Max gets the last poignant word at the end.
Wyld's work had me thinking about how she can cover such deep and dark material and yet still have us eagerly turning the pages. Apart from her marvellous turn of phrase and quirky Aussie humour that raises its head at odd moments, it has to be about tension and resolution. She plants questions and strings you along, delaying the answers. That is what good writers do.
This story is about sadness, love, family tensions, people screwing up their lives and having to live with the fallout...and the fallout it burdens others with in obvious and secret ways throughout their lives, and on, down through the generations.
I turned the last page and felt a wave of sadness of time passing and the inevitability of life going on. The floating dust motes, the fingerprints...and the echoes.
EW first came to my attention when she was featured in Granta's ten-yearly Best of Young British Writers (young meaning <40). The definition of British has flexed over the years, but Wyld has called the UK her home, running a bookstore in Peckham, for many years now. My first whole work of hers was All the Birds Singing, which is unusual and haunting. It also launched her into wider attention when it won her the Miles Franklin, Australia's top literary award.
Wyld followed this up with The Bass Rock which won her the Stella prize, Australia's equivalent to the UK's Orange prize for women. And yet... for me, it is Wyld's first novel that has lived with me the longest. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice has a troubled male protagonist where all the action is in Australia. This is her least discussed book, and I'm not sure why.
Okay, let's talk about The Echoes. If you enjoy EW's writing, you can stop here and just go and order it. If you enjoyed the tripartite plot structure and the ghostly element of The Bass Rock, likewise. No need to muck around, just do yourself a favour.
The Echoes has an elegant structure, with the sections more clearly identified for those who found TBR's a little hard to follow. We have After, where Max is a ghost hovering around the edges of Hannah's post-Max life; Before sections cover their lives together when he was alive. Then, flips back to Australia to Hannah's family life when she was a pre-teen. The Then sections also have their own haunting element whereby the characters live on the site of an old school used to 'educate' stolen indigenous children. This sequence is tied up with a coda piece named for a particular character, and is about their experiences and inner thoughts. Like a musical composition, this pattern is repeated, progressing through different players until Max gets the last poignant word at the end.
Wyld's work had me thinking about how she can cover such deep and dark material and yet still have us eagerly turning the pages. Apart from her marvellous turn of phrase and quirky Aussie humour that raises its head at odd moments, it has to be about tension and resolution. She plants questions and strings you along, delaying the answers. That is what good writers do.
This story is about sadness, love, family tensions, people screwing up their lives and having to live with the fallout...and the fallout it burdens others with in obvious and secret ways throughout their lives, and on, down through the generations.
I turned the last page and felt a wave of sadness of time passing and the inevitability of life going on. The floating dust motes, the fingerprints...and the echoes.
August 1, 2024
The Echoes by Evie Wyld:
Hannah and Max’s relationship was never great, but now Max is dead, still present in the flat, watching his partner, waiting for the purgatory to end. It’s a tricksy book stylistically, it works best in the chapters where Max is present, watching insects and feeling the presence of everyone who has/ever will live in the flat and seeing Hannah move on in life.
Stylistically, it moves between this and Hannah’s life in late 90’s Australia. And there’s enough bogans, op shops and Anzac biscuits to satisfy nostalgia freaks. Literary readers will enjoy the overarching concept that the eponymous Echoes is the housing estate teenage Hannah lives on, but is also the afterlife that Max lives in and also partially what indigenous Australians call The Dreamtime.
Tonally though, the book seems to suffer from an uneven, emotionally shifting and often jarring tone. It’s meta enough to reference Ghost, Ghostbusters, Truly, Madly, Deeply and Ted Hughes’ poem Anniversary. However, the sly wink of the short story Hannah works on in Uni - resembling Wyld’s best-known novel All The Birds, Singing - seems a little too cute for its own good. See also, Hannah’s mental health crisis portrayed with great dignity, Max’s death played for laughs.
It’s a novel that Sunday supplements will love, but personally, I found it too erratic to be truly beautiful. It’s published by Penguin on August 1st and I thank them for a preview copy. #theechoes
Hannah and Max’s relationship was never great, but now Max is dead, still present in the flat, watching his partner, waiting for the purgatory to end. It’s a tricksy book stylistically, it works best in the chapters where Max is present, watching insects and feeling the presence of everyone who has/ever will live in the flat and seeing Hannah move on in life.
Stylistically, it moves between this and Hannah’s life in late 90’s Australia. And there’s enough bogans, op shops and Anzac biscuits to satisfy nostalgia freaks. Literary readers will enjoy the overarching concept that the eponymous Echoes is the housing estate teenage Hannah lives on, but is also the afterlife that Max lives in and also partially what indigenous Australians call The Dreamtime.
Tonally though, the book seems to suffer from an uneven, emotionally shifting and often jarring tone. It’s meta enough to reference Ghost, Ghostbusters, Truly, Madly, Deeply and Ted Hughes’ poem Anniversary. However, the sly wink of the short story Hannah works on in Uni - resembling Wyld’s best-known novel All The Birds, Singing - seems a little too cute for its own good. See also, Hannah’s mental health crisis portrayed with great dignity, Max’s death played for laughs.
It’s a novel that Sunday supplements will love, but personally, I found it too erratic to be truly beautiful. It’s published by Penguin on August 1st and I thank them for a preview copy. #theechoes
April 13, 2025
The Echoes, a geographical location in Australia where Native peoples were colonized, also symbolize the ripples that sprawl outwards from a point of disturbance. For Hannah’s family, the points are her grandmother’s neglect of her two kids. Her mother, Carrie, is sexually assaulted by her classmates; her uncle, Tone, sexually assaults his niece, Rachel. Hannah’s deceased boyfriend, Max, doesn’t know about her abortion; thus, he lingers as a ghost, watching Hannah. Unfortunately, I was neither engaged with the writing nor the story once I was too far in to put the book down.
August 4, 2025
After All the Birds, Singing and now The Echoes, I’ve become a real fan of Evie Wyld. Here, she uses a complex structure to tell a nonlinear story about childhood events whose effects ripple across continents and generations.
July 25, 2024
The Echoes by Evie Wyld is a stunning reflection on grief and love. When Max dies suddenly, his ghost remains trapped in the flat he shared with his girlfriend Hannah. He has no memory of his own death and has no idea why he's still hanging around. From his hallowed state, he observes Hannah's grief for him, through all the stages, waiting, wondering, what is his purpose now? Is it merely to antagonise a cat, or is there something more?
Often funny in a wry way, deeply moving and occasionally shocking, The Echoes is magnificent fiction. Clever and unique with all the feels. The story slips back and forth between the present day, before Max's death, and then further back again to Hannah's life in Australia, from long before she met Max.
This story illustrates just how little we really know each other, how often, it's a case of what we want to show others and what we want to keep hidden, redefining ourselves over and over, changing the narrative and rewriting history.
"I think sometimes silence is better than the wrong person speaking."
There's so much in this story to turn over and reflect upon. It's a beautiful, unique, heartfelt story. I absolutely adored it.
Thanks to Penguin Books Australia for the review copy.
Often funny in a wry way, deeply moving and occasionally shocking, The Echoes is magnificent fiction. Clever and unique with all the feels. The story slips back and forth between the present day, before Max's death, and then further back again to Hannah's life in Australia, from long before she met Max.
This story illustrates just how little we really know each other, how often, it's a case of what we want to show others and what we want to keep hidden, redefining ourselves over and over, changing the narrative and rewriting history.
"I think sometimes silence is better than the wrong person speaking."
There's so much in this story to turn over and reflect upon. It's a beautiful, unique, heartfelt story. I absolutely adored it.
Thanks to Penguin Books Australia for the review copy.
June 14, 2025
Every love story is a ghost story - David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
I always took DFW’s quote to mean something metaphorical. That we are haunted by our histories and bring them into our romances, or that past versions of our relationship (dating, “honeymoon phase,” us before becoming parents, etc.) haunt us over time. I’ve never been fully able to make sense of the phrase, but one must admit: it’s beautiful, and evocative.
In Evie Wyld’s lovely new novel, The Echoes, she decides to take this quote literally.
Max and Hannah are a 30s-ish couple living in a London flat that’s damp but in a killer location. They’re essentially like millions of other couples living in Europe. The only difference in their case is that Max is dead, and is more or less haunting Hannah.
At least in the “after” sections. Wyld breaks up the book into relatively short sections (makes sense for a relatively short book) labelled either for time or for a person. “After” deals with Max haunting Hannah in their flat, being an “invisible, floating nervous system.” He tries to make sense of his postmortem existence and to develop his powers of influence over the world of the living. “Before” follows Hannah’s perspective in her relationship with Max. These sections tend to be more painful, as they primarily follow their latter-day relationship when they bicker and storm out on a regular basis, trying to figure out how to maintain their relationship with the weight of their past and resentments pressing down on them. In “then,” we’re made privy to some of Hannah’s history in Australia as a child before she moved to England.
Had enough sections? Evie Wyld hasn’t! There are also briefer sections, usually (or exclusively?) one-offs of characters in Hannah’s family–her mother, father, sister, uncle, uncle’s patner, great-grandmother….I think that’s everybody. It sometimes feels like a lot for such a small book, but it didn’t end up feeling overwhelming. My primary problem with the seemingly innumerable sections was that I was more interested in Hannah and Max’s perspectives/storylines than the historical ones. I ran into this problem in Wyld’s previous (excellent) novel The Bass Rock where certain sections just don’t quite hold my interest as much. But! They are still good, so it was not a big deal.
Wyld’s greatest strength is her narrative voice. She manages to accurately capture a lot of humanity very effectively with straightforward, mildly sardonic prose that rang true regardless of character. I found myself really connecting and empathizing with Hannah and Max’s characters as they navigated their relationship. You could feel their pain, frustration, and struggle as they tried to figure out, with where we’ve been, where do we go from here? Their fights that went nuclear from seemingly innocuous comments and inevitably got out of control had me cringing for them as they couldn’t get out of a well of pain developed over the years. I also liked them both a lot, and was rooting for them to figure things out.
The flashback sections, as I mentioned, weren’t as compelling, but got into deep psychological explorations of each character in a relatively short amount of time. Even though we only get one short chapter with various members of Hannah’s family, you get to know them really well over time, and the portrait of the family becomes increasingly psychologically complex over time, building up to a crazy climax.
In true Wyld fashion, there are also some mild mysteries she dangles out there over the course of the book that keep you hooked and flipping pages–how did Max Die? Why is Hannah estranged from her family? Where were Hannah and Max at in their relationship when he died? Finding breadcrumbs throughout the book was a nice addition to the psychological and emotional exploration.
Interestingly, Wyld places an author’s note at the end regarding abuse and mistreatment of indigenous peoples in Australia. She essentially says that she does not have the right to write a story from the perspective of an indigenous person, but can write a story about the inability of white Australians to grapple with their colonial past. I didn’t think that was a hugely relevant part of the book, with the exception of some brief mentions of an abusive school in the town and the negative interactions of Hannah’s family with the surrounding indigenous population. Not relevant enough to warrant an author’s note, at least. That was more of a puzzling authorial choice than anything that impacted my enjoyment of the book.
For me, Wyld continues her winning streak with this book. It’s my third by her, and she definitely has a formula, but it’s one that keeps me hooked. By turning this love story into a ghost story, she manages to illuminate in moving and humorous ways how memory and multiple histories impact us over time and contribute to the human struggle that we all face.
I always took DFW’s quote to mean something metaphorical. That we are haunted by our histories and bring them into our romances, or that past versions of our relationship (dating, “honeymoon phase,” us before becoming parents, etc.) haunt us over time. I’ve never been fully able to make sense of the phrase, but one must admit: it’s beautiful, and evocative.
In Evie Wyld’s lovely new novel, The Echoes, she decides to take this quote literally.
Max and Hannah are a 30s-ish couple living in a London flat that’s damp but in a killer location. They’re essentially like millions of other couples living in Europe. The only difference in their case is that Max is dead, and is more or less haunting Hannah.
At least in the “after” sections. Wyld breaks up the book into relatively short sections (makes sense for a relatively short book) labelled either for time or for a person. “After” deals with Max haunting Hannah in their flat, being an “invisible, floating nervous system.” He tries to make sense of his postmortem existence and to develop his powers of influence over the world of the living. “Before” follows Hannah’s perspective in her relationship with Max. These sections tend to be more painful, as they primarily follow their latter-day relationship when they bicker and storm out on a regular basis, trying to figure out how to maintain their relationship with the weight of their past and resentments pressing down on them. In “then,” we’re made privy to some of Hannah’s history in Australia as a child before she moved to England.
Had enough sections? Evie Wyld hasn’t! There are also briefer sections, usually (or exclusively?) one-offs of characters in Hannah’s family–her mother, father, sister, uncle, uncle’s patner, great-grandmother….I think that’s everybody. It sometimes feels like a lot for such a small book, but it didn’t end up feeling overwhelming. My primary problem with the seemingly innumerable sections was that I was more interested in Hannah and Max’s perspectives/storylines than the historical ones. I ran into this problem in Wyld’s previous (excellent) novel The Bass Rock where certain sections just don’t quite hold my interest as much. But! They are still good, so it was not a big deal.
Wyld’s greatest strength is her narrative voice. She manages to accurately capture a lot of humanity very effectively with straightforward, mildly sardonic prose that rang true regardless of character. I found myself really connecting and empathizing with Hannah and Max’s characters as they navigated their relationship. You could feel their pain, frustration, and struggle as they tried to figure out, with where we’ve been, where do we go from here? Their fights that went nuclear from seemingly innocuous comments and inevitably got out of control had me cringing for them as they couldn’t get out of a well of pain developed over the years. I also liked them both a lot, and was rooting for them to figure things out.
The flashback sections, as I mentioned, weren’t as compelling, but got into deep psychological explorations of each character in a relatively short amount of time. Even though we only get one short chapter with various members of Hannah’s family, you get to know them really well over time, and the portrait of the family becomes increasingly psychologically complex over time, building up to a crazy climax.
In true Wyld fashion, there are also some mild mysteries she dangles out there over the course of the book that keep you hooked and flipping pages–how did Max Die? Why is Hannah estranged from her family? Where were Hannah and Max at in their relationship when he died? Finding breadcrumbs throughout the book was a nice addition to the psychological and emotional exploration.
Interestingly, Wyld places an author’s note at the end regarding abuse and mistreatment of indigenous peoples in Australia. She essentially says that she does not have the right to write a story from the perspective of an indigenous person, but can write a story about the inability of white Australians to grapple with their colonial past. I didn’t think that was a hugely relevant part of the book, with the exception of some brief mentions of an abusive school in the town and the negative interactions of Hannah’s family with the surrounding indigenous population. Not relevant enough to warrant an author’s note, at least. That was more of a puzzling authorial choice than anything that impacted my enjoyment of the book.
For me, Wyld continues her winning streak with this book. It’s my third by her, and she definitely has a formula, but it’s one that keeps me hooked. By turning this love story into a ghost story, she manages to illuminate in moving and humorous ways how memory and multiple histories impact us over time and contribute to the human struggle that we all face.
January 12, 2025
First, a big thank you to Knopf for the gifted copy. The pub date is 2/18/2025, so right around the corner.
This was a haunting and atmospheric novel that lingers in your mind long after the final page (trust me, I'm still sitting with it and will for some time).
The Echoes weaves together trauma, memory, and generational secrets against the backdrop of a remote, unforgiving location in Australia. Wyld's prose is stunning - evocative and raw, pulling you into each character's inner worlds (especially Hannah and Max).
What I loved most was how deeply human this story felt. The emotional weight of buried pasts shaping present lives was masterfully done. It paints an accurate picture of the effects of generational trauma, generation after generation.
If you want both a ghost story and a love story with a character-driven story, vivid setting, and a touch of mystery, this one's for you. Just make sure you check the trigger warnings before you dig in.
This was a haunting and atmospheric novel that lingers in your mind long after the final page (trust me, I'm still sitting with it and will for some time).
The Echoes weaves together trauma, memory, and generational secrets against the backdrop of a remote, unforgiving location in Australia. Wyld's prose is stunning - evocative and raw, pulling you into each character's inner worlds (especially Hannah and Max).
What I loved most was how deeply human this story felt. The emotional weight of buried pasts shaping present lives was masterfully done. It paints an accurate picture of the effects of generational trauma, generation after generation.
If you want both a ghost story and a love story with a character-driven story, vivid setting, and a touch of mystery, this one's for you. Just make sure you check the trigger warnings before you dig in.
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