This book Was easy to follow whilst the narrative jumps between time to sectioned with Max as a ghost trapped in the flat, who can’t leave. And then the After”; Hannah’s chapters, set in the run-up to Max’s death, called “Before”; and “Then” – flashbacks to Hannah’s childhood in rural Australia.

Lots of fascinating stories inside stories. Full of tension. The characters have you immersed in the storyline and you want to genuinely know why Hannah left for the UK.

Heart wrenching at times. Also dark, witty and laugh out loud.

A story that highlights emotions, grief and trauma. Hidden secrets and how they can shatter your relationships.
And how life really does go on for those left living.

I really enjoyed this book!

A complex, emotional, tense, and compelling novel. It is a heavy read, and I found myself feeling really weighted down by the end of the book, but that does not take away from how gorgeous and important this novel is.

I loved Evie Wyld's Bass Rock and think about it regularly. The joy of being granted access to her new novel "Echoes" was huge.
Unfortunately I couldn't connect with it like I did with Bass Rock. The premise sounds exactly like my cup of tea. In the end I think it was the wrong moment for me to read this. Too heavy, too detailed, too toxic of a relationship. I couldn't understand why Max and Hannah were together. Hannah's past in Australia was of no interest to me. Halfway through I decided not to be miserable as well and to quit this read. If you have to force yourself to keep on reading, you know it isn't worth it.

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..

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 a bit 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.

I've read and liked Wyld before, finding her a powerful, surprising and edgy writer - this one fell flat for me. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood but I wish I'd loved this as much as other reviewers.

The Echoes is a book of family secrets, trauma and love. The storytelling is just masterful, with complicated characters and dynamics unfurling with the kind of ease that makes you forget you're reading and sucks you into the story completely. I loved how the story started off from a ghost's perspective and then gradually the layers peel off and you learn about a huge cast of characters, some who've endured horrors, some who've committed them (and many both), but who are all devastatingly real. Evie Wyld is an incredibly talented writer and I'm so glad I get to read her books.

The Echoes by Evie Wyld blew me away! It's a quietly powerful book of family, and relationships, and love, and how events in the past echo down the ages, affecting generation after generation. Max narrates much of the book from beyond the grave, as he watches his love Hannah continue with what should have been their life together. Hannah herself is struggling to forget her dark past, the tragic events of which she must come to terms with before she can move on. The Echoes is a haunting, profound and ultimately wonderful novel. Awesome stuff from Wyld!

A jewel of a book: ineffably sad, hilariously irreverent and gorgeously layered. The pitch perfect writing draws you into the story from the get-go. Wylde’s style is so naturalistic, so seemingly effortless that she could almost be transcribing the thoughts of real people. At the same time her descriptions are gorgeous. Max, the ghost (it sounds more kooky than it reads) finds himself ‘a tumbleweed of hair and dust’, Natalia remembers ‘the chocolate-cake sound of Grandad’s shovel sinking into the earth of the garden.’ Young Hannah and her sister, spirited and feral, are highlights of the book. A racist old man is described as smelling ‘of earwax and unwashed bum crack’.

Whilst the book covers pretty grim territory, it is also very very funny: I particularly loved the way Max, a keen cook when alive, is so appalled by the culinary crimes committed by Hannah when he dies: “The water is unsalted and not at a rolling boil and the pot is far too small to cook any shape of pasta in…. The pasta will have overcooked by the time she’s chopped a single vegetable…’

The ending landed a bit softly for me but this is a minor point compared with the brilliance of the book as a whole and you may not feel the same. Affecting and wonderful.

“I do not believe in ghosts, which since my death, has become something of a problem”

Straight away from this line, I knew I was going to really enjoy this read. The story is based around an emotionally strained couple, Hannah and Max. There is one problem, however, Max has just died from an accident he can't quite remember. The book is divided into 3 perspectives 'before', 'after' & 'then', based around before Max's death, after Max's death & also Hannah's past, one that she wants to keep from Max & distance from her current self.

This book isn't a comfortable read, but a powerful one, and executes covering topics such as family trauma, love & loss & grief extremely well. This is definitely a read that'll stay with me for a long time!

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.

This wonderfully complex and compelling novel from Evie Wyld is haunted both figuratively and literally by ghosts and echoes of the past. Hannah is a young Australian woman who has moved to London where she shares a flat with her partner Max. The book opens with Max, who has been killed, returning to the flat and observing Hanna as a ghost – even though up to then he hasn’t believed in ghosts. This sounds, perhaps, a bit whimsical, but in Evie Wyld’s confident hands the conceit works perfectly, as bit by bit the reader discovers the back story. The narrative moves between Max’s chapters as a ghost, title “After”; Hannha’s chapters leading to Max’s death titled “Before”; and chapters titled “Then” describing Hannah’s dysfunctional and traumatic past growing up with her family in Australia. With constantly shifting time frames, perspective and place, it’s not an easy story to navigate but well with the effort. Wyld is an extremely clever writer and handles her material expertly, sustaining the tension throughout as bit by bit everything falls into place. It’s a short novel but one which packs a lot in. Unsettling, tender and sometimes amusing, I found it a marvellous read, which I very much enjoyed.

I was reluctant to describe The Echoes as haunting, given that one of the main characters is a ghost, but it truly is. I read it over the course of a few weeks and felt genuinely emotionally haunted by this book. I kept finding my mind returning to Max's experiences as a ghost, feeling this intense sadness at him being there, but not able to be seen by his girlfriend, Hannah. I found that Max's reduced/absent capacity for emotional response as a ghost allowed for the focus to stay on Hannah's story. It also raises interesting questions around what really 'matters' while we are alive.

The Echoes flits between 'before', 'then' and 'after', offering snapshots of Max and Hannah's relationship, but also weaving in Hannah's childhood in Australia. You get the feeling quite early on that something bad happened, but it is revealed slowly, with layers being peeled away gradually, giving context to decisions made by Hannah's immediate family.

The 'echoes' are not just the echoes left when someone passes away, but also of intergenerational trauma - be advised this book covers topics which may be triggering - abuse and self-harm.

The Echoes will stay with me for a long time.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the digital ARC.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Uk Vintage for allowing me an early read of this beautiful book.
This is my first experience of Evie Wyld's writing and it just pulled me right in.
The story is about a couple in love, Max and Hannah only Max is ripped away from Hannah and she has to learn to grieve.
Wyld has written the story as present day and past as Max permeates throughout their flat as a ghost trying to contact Hannah. We learn how their life was, all their niggles and great times and We get to see how one copes with trauma and tge strategies put in place.
This is a brilliant read. If you want a book that's actually different, this is the book to grab, you won't be disappointed!
Available on 1st August!

'I realise now why ghosts are not the main characters of stories. Even the cat has stopped paying attention to me.'

Max is dead, but his spirit cannot leave the flat he shared with his troubled girlfriend Hannah. As he lingers, we learn about Hannah's traumatic family history, growing up with her goat-farming parents in the Australian outback on a patch of land called the Echoes. Her uncle Tone is now the only one of her relatives who still carries the memory of the industrial school that once stood there, where Indigenous children were stolen from their people and forced to attend, sometimes until they died. At a family Christmas dinner, he announces, to everybody's discomfort, that he wants to do a toast: 'I'd like to respect the people who were here before. It's not a lot. But it's something'. He takes his teenage nieces to the old schoolhouse, where he tells them 'There's bones over the whole fucking place. My roots shouldn't be growing over those bones'. Evie Wyld's choice of Tone as witness is inspired; as both abused and abuser, alcoholic and self-harmer, he speaks to one of the central questions at the heart of The Echoes. Who gets to tell certain stories? Is Tone right when he says 'I'm the wrong one to be talking, but what's worse, the wrong person talking or no one talking?' or is Hannah's statement 'I think sometimes silence is better than the wrong person speaking' more important, as she thinks back to the impact Tone had on her life and her sister Rach's?

The Echoes seems to be in conversation with all of Wyld's previous work. It picks up on themes of abusive families and men in rural Australia more strongly, for my money, than The Bass Rock and After The Fire, A Small Still Voice. Hannah and Rach's fascination with sharks also recalls how cleverly Wyld explored her own childhood obsession in the graphic novel Everything is Teeth. But the unravelling of a traumatic past has rarely been done better by anyone than Wyld does in All The Birds, Singing, and for that reason some of The Echoes felt superfluous to me. I found the book weakest when it jumped outside the perspectives of Hannah and Max - it's here that it comes closest to being a more simplistic story about how damaged people inevitably damage others, because the voices of most of the other narrators aren't strongly differentiated enough to lift it. This, however, sits in sharp contrast with how vividly Wyld writes secondary characters like Hannah's parents, Piers and Kerry, her best friend Janey, and Janey's daughter Maddie - so long as we stay outside their heads. Tonally, the book also feels a little more uncertain in the middle, when Max's wry, slightly silly narration begins to jar both with the fact of his own death and Wyld's deep, brilliant engagement with the derealisation that Hannah begins to experience. Somehow, though, Wyld brings this back to deliver a knockout ending, as Max too adopts a more elegiac tone.

I was left wondering, as Max does, why he lingers in this story at all, but I think he is there to say something bigger about how we persist as long as there's one person left to remember us. Given this, perhaps Tone's toast isn't completely useless; it's an attempt to speak, however clumsily, to a wider forgetting. Max's role also illustrates the limitations of the white Western narrative structures he taught as a creative writing lecturer; sometimes characters don't have agency, or a clear goal, or a problem they can overcome. Sometimes all they can do is keep hanging around.

A mesmerising novel that asks: what makes you you?

From the off, this book begins with a death. Loving boyfriend Max has died and he returns as a disembodied ghost to watch over his Australian girlfriend Hannah as she deals with the aftermath. So far, so Patrick Swayze in Ghost. But then the narrative turns to Hannah before Max's death. before she even came to Britain, and her childhood in Australia, and then we see the viewpoints of her dysfunctional family, her mum and dad Kerry and Piers, sister Rach, uncle Tone, in the pivotal moments of their stories, as generational trauma echoes and reverberates through their lives, all the way to Hannah in her grief over Max. Meanwhile, Max is getting stronger, and he manages to tip over Hannah's newly adopted cat. Surely, the ghostly reunion is on its way.

In equal parts comedic and disturbing, the ghostly narrative is the least shocking, with the various plot lines of Hannah's family taking a slow boil to reveal what drove them all apart. To hide their shame and their pain, they tell lies to the world, to each other, and. to themselves, withdrawing into least denominator personalities to navigate everyday challenges and mental ones too, with varying degrees of success. But at the end of the day, as it is for everyone, no-one gets out alive.

Three and a half stars, rounded up to four.

A couple of years ago I read The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld and was deeply touched by it in a manner that so few contemporary authors have accomplished for me. I think this was, at least in part, due to the book's setting, a large portion of it taking place in and around North Berwick which is Scottish seaside town I know well from my childhood holidays. The way Wyld was able to capture something of the simultaneous warmth and coldness that permeates Scottish provincialism was immediately affecting. Small, rugged settlements where the fields, hills, church spires, and quaint cafes exist more vehemently than much of the modern signs of mass industry and the flickering lights of an overwrought populace.

Rural Scotland is a place wherein history is broad and fairly ugly; less tartan glory and peaceful glens and more undernourished, undervalued humans and land. We also have some of the most heinous figures in our annals, for our lingering desire to plant a Saltire over the Union propelled extensive colonial and missionary endeavours, murdering people and cultures alike. Within the socio-economic boundaries this principle still seeps through; do we want association or independence? Within the home, I fear there is a perennial conditioning to remember and retribute injustices with blistering intent. It was this fractured soul of what it means to be Scottish, historically and contemporarily; what is means to be a woman in this country so romanticised for its bards and castles, its pitter-patter of rain, its buttery shortbread, its Gothic greyness ripe for passionate appeals to nature, that tremendously impacted me.

The Echoes, unbelievably, roused a similar feeling within me. Although this time Wyld takes us between London and Australia, I entered back into that same particular, crunching, swirling space where, like the ladies of The Bass Rock, identities tie themselves to anachronic delineations of geography, topography and architecture. A space where people grow and crumble with the friability, the harshness of spades hacking at parched earth or nails wildly hammered through walls at appalling angles. A space where death comes before a performative resurrection; a fantastic play of healing and understanding, a binding of oneself to home as something contained, explicable, and personable. And what a horror it is to observe that terraqueous, tangible wholeness dash itself into emotional, twitching shards.

This is what makes Wyld's rendering of Hannah and her family's story so fluid despite its ostensibly staccato movements. As we attempt to sift through the characters' complex sources of grief, fear, and hope, we are transported back and forth, in time and space, from a slightly eldritch flat in London to an isolated series of homesteads in rural Australia, saturated in despicable histories and elusively recognised as The Echoes. In this latter location, we slowly build a picture of colonialist and sexual injustices pervading the ruptured community whilst various elements of nature emphasise a sense of neglect and familial canker; swamping, scurrying, yet occasionally providing solace. The issues of this family are deliberately contentious, indistinct even; in most instances the pointed distance, distrust, and dismissal the characters actively place between themselves and their trauma reflects back on you as a reader, silencing your probing inquiry.

In London, Hannah is a solitary remnant of her Australian upbringing trying, but unable to, assimilate to the inexplicable routine of physical and emotional autonomy; as a result she wants asphyxiation then billowing, lightening airflow in startling jerks of doubtful selfhood. Hannah has a boyfriend, Max, who embodies both an oblivious modern togetherness and another form of echoes in his ghostly, incisive yet painfully quixotic nature. I feel many of us know a Max, those few people who don't have to (or don't want to) search for their place in the world, likewise their principles, their vocation. They seem static, nonplussed, so connected to society and yet so far away from its individualised, meticulous concerns; those gnarly roots that stretch through the loam and force their way through letterboxes, down the back of cupboards, under the nailbeds.

Perhaps this ignorance is not so veracious, just veiled by Max's impalpable presence in the story, and if we were to hear of his family in the same concentration as Hannah's then maybe we could feel the excrescence of his roots too. For what it is, however, Max stands for the passage of an external life (success in work, relationships, domesticity) whereas Hannah denotes the rolling, caching internal experience roughly shaped into external compatibility. I deeply resonate with this unforgiving moulding; the necessity to look acceptable even if you don't think acceptably. It inculcates an existence of soft pressures (finding matching socks, trying to 'browse' in a shop) and hard pressures (remember to eat, don't think about the woman you have to call your mother.) It's a sickly, vertiginous sensation, like leaping from one demand to the next where rationality slips despairingly through the gaps, leaving mortification and terror to debilitate. Exhaustively, it is mercurial, inconsecutive, briefly but profoundly agonising.

Wyld's style of interwoven significance between person and place permits a discomfiting, effectively jumpy narrative voice, where undrunk coffee, rock cake, and locked bathrooms have as much import as inner despair, physical injury, and intergenerational contemplation. In turn, this is a tale of neither consummate failure nor success, of sadness nor joy; it is simply, and sincerely, a story of being, a family rumination that prompts silent feeling instead of crushing societal questions. Like The Bass Rock, reading The Echoes directed me to take an oblique saunter through my life, emotions, and experiences. Rather than forcing drastic self-reassessment or fervent activist awakenings, Wyld created an environment that enabled me to pass by my existence without derision or denigration; merely a desultory glance and a few nods, confirming I am here, and that's the kind of subtle empathy I crave and, ultimately, adulate.

*I was gifted a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.*

The Echoes is an emotional, character-driven novel, moving between the perspectives of Max, Hannah, and Hannah’s family. It shows Hannah’s childhood in rural Australia, and the traumatic events that shaped her, piecing together memories that she tried to leave behind.

I loved Max’s ghostly perspective, combining haunting humour with the tear-inducing reflections on being unable to continue your life with loved ones. This was a refreshing exploration of grief and relationships, emotionally impactful and beautiful, showing a complex picture of romantic love.

Hannah’s past was revealed piece by piece, with seemingly insignificant moments coming together to form a harrowing narrative. This structure was unsettling, with time jumps and perspective shifts making this more intense, revealing a past far-removed from her present reality. Evie Wyld can really create an atmosphere, and these childhood scenes felt distant but so vivid, creating an effective representation of trauma. This all came together at the end, in a way that was satisfying but realistic, bringing the threads together with an incredibly powerful ending that had me tearing up.

Loved this so much and can’t wait to read more from Evie Wyld. Thank you to Vintage Books and NetGalley for the gifted copy 😊

Wow! What an intriguing jigsaw puzzle of a book, from its opening line spoken by a ghost, “I do not believe in ghosts, which since my death, has become something of a problem”, to the fractured narration in vignette format, split between time-lines, different locations and different voices.

On the surface it is the story of the relationship between Hannah and Max, a couple in their thirties, strained by whether they should marry and have children. We learn early on that Hannah has just undergone an abortion but unknown to Max. In their six-year relationship, Hannah has kept her past a secret. She has never introduced Max to her parents in Australia.

Through this intricately structured book, Hannah’s backstory slowly and tantalisingly unfolds, with its secrets and past traumas, revealing four generations of the family Max has been kept away from. From Hannah’s early childhood in Australia, growing up in the shadow of a dilapidated reform school for indigenous children,(The Echoes) to her adolescent longings and emotional confusion as she becomes aware of the strange relationship between her older sister Rachel and uncle Tone, her mother’s brother. He is a hard-drinking labourer with a quick temper who can’t keep down a job and whose upbringing, like her own mother’s, is one involving drink, drugs and child abuse.

Hannah hoped that with Max she could leave her past behind, but her past won’t go away, it expresses itself in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max. She struggles in her adult life in London, self-harming and refusing to confront her past. Max the reluctant ghost watches his girlfriend in their shared flat as she works through her grief at his death. He slowly begins to realise that he didn’t really know her. Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape.

This beautifully written book full of pathos and humour, is often unsettling as it explores loss, grief, traumatic pasts and complex relationships. However, the end does offer hope, and left me with a sense of closure.

The Echoes is Evie Wyld’s fourth book apparently. It is a short novel, but goodness me, she packs a lot into it. I had never heard of the author before. But thank you NetGalley for introducing her to me and I look forward to catching up with her other books.

Yvonne Maxwell
31st July 2024

I found this really emotional! So insightful on grief and missed chances and how life can take unexpected turns. A great central mystery plot at the heart of it too.

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.

This book reminded me of Demon Copperhead. Tragic patterns of generational abuse and trauma. Set in the UK and Australia which I loved.