CW: I’ll generalise these as traumatic events.
Someone does, then this someone watches a loved one deal with all stages of grief and intergenerational trauma.
The Echoes is structured into different sections for different timelines and POVs. While this was only about 1% of the reading experience, I am camp ‘the titles carry a weight too’ and kept wondering if the chapter were named differently, if that would have added to my experience.
Though, the structure and the signposting are clear and this book is an ideal length.
In the end, I felt sorry for most of the characters, but despite the darker aspects of this book, Wyld knows how to deal with sensitive or dark themes and topics.
Plot: 3.5
Themes: 4.5
Writing: 4.5
Characterisation: 4
Idea/concept: 4
The setting: 3.5

I look forward to reading Wyld’s future work.
Thank you #netgalley and #joanthancape for an ARC.
I feel very fortunate this summer thanks to some of the books that I have been reading.

3.5

What worked for me:
- Our concept of exploring grief through the eyes of someone stuck as a ghost is what drew me to this book - I’ve never read anything quite like it!
- The writing in this book is excellent
- Our story is artfully plotted, detailing layers of generational trauma with with incredibly human, complex, and raw characterisations
- I loved all the mentions of the London parakeets
- The importance of the residential school theme - in a book about intergenerational trauma, this was a beautiful way of illustrating the trauma that White settlers inflicted on generations of Indigenous people. My roots shouldn’t be growing over these bones.

What confused me:
- While I understood Hannah’s reticence to share her past and trauma with Max, I genuinely didn’t understand why she stayed with him. They didn’t seem like they had a healthy or caring relationship. I found Max really hard to like, especially as we spent time with him as a ghost: he felt pompous, whiny, and kinda creepy.

What I wasn’t so keen on:
- The story itself is verybleak - I closed this book feeling very heavy
- I wasn’t wild about the vivid descriptions of Max watching Hannah empty her menstrual cup

I was privileged to have my request to read this book accepted through NetGalley. Thank you, Random House UK, Vintage.

This is really a book in two parts. There is the odd perspective of Max, who finds himself a ghost in his own flat, watching the aftermath of his sudden death, and learning more about his girlfriend and the reality of their relationship now that it has ended but he can still bear witness. The other part is the earlier storyline of Hannah's childhood in a remote part of Australia known as the Echoes and the events that led her to move to London and become estranged from her family. The atmosphere of the two is very different, though Hannah's loneliness and longing is key in both. Wyld is excellent in conjuring internal and external isolation as well as sowing the seeds that lead to that creeping sense that there is something dark below the surface. I enjoyed both parts but couldn't shake the feeling that they didn't really belong together and that both deserved to be a story within its own right without the baggage of the other. Nevertheless, Wyld is an excellent author and her ability to meld past and present, the mundane and the ethereal gives her books wonderful depth and tone, though here it it not shown as strongly as her other works.

The Australian born, London based author Evie Wyld’s first three novels have all been prize winners – “After the Fire, A Small Voice” (John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), “All The Birds Singing” (Miles Franklin Award, RSL Encore Award), “Bass Rock” (Stella Prize) – of which the most prestigious are the two Australian award; she was also part of the 2013 group of the decennial Granta Best of British Young Novelists list.

It is perhaps appropriate then that this, her fourth novel, is set part in London and part in Australia and very much about the long links, and echoes between the two.

The book opens in a section titled “After” and in the voice of Max and the memorable opening line “I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem”. Max – an Englishman - is in the South West London flat he shared/shares with his Australian flatmate Hannah (who after the creative writing course where they first met gave up writing and works in a pub) and unsure of exactly how he died, how to communicate to Hannah and how to leave the flat (either terrestrially or on a spiritual plane level). Max now teaches creative writing which enables him Wyld via him to engage in some meta-meditation on the difficulty of having him as the central character at the heart of a story when he does not really know what he wants, cannot change and cannot encounter experiences – “I realise now why ghosts are not the main character of the novel”.

And really its is Hannah who is instead the main character – Max’s ”After” sections alternate with “Before” sections in the first person voice of Hannah in the period leading up to Max’s death and some third party and multi-character “Then” sections which tell the complex story of Hannah’s family.

London-based Hannah has recently had an abortion she keeps secret from Max, self-harms (which she again keeps secret) and has completely estranged herself from her ex-goat-farming parents in Australia (for reasons she also does not disclose to Max despite his curiosity). She moved to this particular area of London to be close to a house whose picture is on a small black and white photograph she has of her grandmother (Na)Talia who left for Australia with her mother and father when she was just a girl.

Hannah’s views is that her family “should never have wound up in Australia” and that all of the traumas and difficulties her family faced and which lead to their eventual estrangement have its roots in the decision to emigrate.

As we proceed through the “Then” sections this story gradually unfolds – told in the story of Hannah while she was still at home in an area called the Echoes. Hannah and her increasingly rebellious older sister Rachel live with their parents on the family goat farm, built in the grounds of an old school where indigenous children were taken from their parents, forced into a strict Western education, and often buried in the grounds – something which her mother’s brother Uncle Tone (seemingly like her mother traumatised by the secrets of their own upbringing) is the only one prepared to acknowledge, although unable to deal with other than by attacking those he perceives as not taking it seriously enough.

And the ”Then” sections also contain close third party point of view sections named after various characters (Mr Manningtree – whose parents ran the school, Hannah’s father Piers, Tone’s partner Melissa – all three of these having their own difficult upbringings, Tone, Hannah’s mother Kerry, Rachel – from after she flees home, Natalia) and we see more than ever how abuses and transgressions reverberate across generations in the family and in a country where the same is true (as signified by the terrible history of the school).


The book is impressively executed – the relationship between Max and Hannah and the difficulty of making it succeed when Hannah has not really come to terms with her own generational past, let alone shared it with Max is particularly well done. The complex and conflicted character of Uncle Tone is also well done as are a number of the modern day side characters (for example Hannah’s single-mother friend Janey who could easily hold her own novel).

If had an issue it is that the theme of the book is perhaps a little over done: every character (whatever their generation) seems to have a current day issue stemming from the way they were parented, which in turn is due to the way in which their parents were parented; if “the Echoes” is a real place then it would be a powerful metaphor but I have no reason to believe it is not fictional and as a result its naming in a way to capture the theme of the book seems heavy handed (rather like television programmes which reverse engineer nominative determinism); and I was not really sure the author did enough to justify her choice of having a character as a ghost (which again is a rather obvious analogy for much of what the book is trying to say)

But overall I would not be surprised to see this on prize lists.

'The Echoes' by Evie Wyld is a beautiful novel that explores the impact trauma can have down the generations.

Hannah is haunted by her dead boyfriend Max. Their relationship had highs and lows and secrets, particularly on Hannah's side. From different points of view, these secrets are revealed, and the reader comes to understand why Hannah moved from rural Australia to London, and why she refused to allow Max to meet her family.

Wyld is an amazing writer. This novel is cleverly written, particularly the chapters set in Australia, which are compelling, warm and devastating in equal measure. Max was a writing teacher, and the only part I was less keen on was when writing technique was discussed as it pulled me out of the story a little bit. However, whilst this is not an easy read, its an important one and one I am sure a wide readership will enjoy.

I read and very much enjoyed Evie Wyld’s first two novels, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice and All the Birds, Singing. Wyld is a British/Australian literary fiction writer who grew up in both countries and now lives in London, and her writing tends to meld the contrasting worlds of urban Britain and outback Australia in interesting ways. Her latest novel, The Echoes, is no exception. We start in London with the voice of Max, a ghost who’s not very happy about his predicament:

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

We then go back to before Max’s death to see him living with his Australian girlfriend Hannah, and then we delve deeper into the past to Hannah’s childhood in The Echoes, a desolate part of the Australian outback that’s haunted by echoes of the Aboriginal people who were displaced from the land and of the notorious local school in which hundreds of Aboriginal children, having been forcibly separated from their parents, were forcibly detained and fed mathematics by white teachers who seemed genuinely to believe they were doing something good, even as the children persisted in running away or killing themselves in despair.
the echoes by evie wyld

Amid the misery of Hannah’s childhood, she holds onto an old black and white photograph of a child, her grandmother, standing in front of an old house in London. The photograph, for her, represents a time of hope, before the family moved to Australia, before things started to go wrong. If she could just get back to that place, she reasons, it will be possible to mend everything that was broken.

The echoes of the title, then, are multi-faceted. It’s the name of the place where Hannah grew up, but there are also echoes of past events (mostly past trauma) rippling through the lives of everyone in the book. The powerlessness of Max, the ghost floating around in the London flat, observing Hannah first grieving and then slowly moving on to a new life without him, is not too different from many of the other characters. Unlike him, they can actually influence the world around them and try to break free of the echoes of the past, but many of them struggle to do so. Hannah is able to find her way to live in the same region of London as her ancestors left from, and she even visits the house from the photograph, but it provides no answers. She still secretly self-harms, still seems stuck in her life, still struggles to escape from the echoes of the past.

Wyld handles the multiple, inter-generational timelines effectively. They are all interspersed in chapters that follow the same pattern throughout the book: we start with “After” in the voice of Max the ghost, and then we go to “Before” to witness the recent past with Hannah and Max, told from Hannah’s point of view, and then we go back to “Then” to witness the more distant past in The Echoes in Australia, told in limited third person from Hannah’s point of view. There are also separate chapters named after other characters in the outback story, in which the third-person narration switches to their perspective to reveal things that are often very different.

It might sound difficult to follow, but it isn’t. The pattern of After/Before/Then, After/Before/Then starts to feel quite familiar and even appropriate, like the echoes of the title bouncing around from past to present and back again. And, for me, each strand worked well on its own. It’s worth mentioning, however, that when I referred to this book in my May reading roundup, Bill from The Australian Legend blog said he wasn’t impressed by Evie Wyld’s knowledge of the Australian outback—not in this particular book but in her previous writing. I mention that because I’ve found the UK settings in Wyld’s writing very authentic and true, and I wanted to include a different perspective from someone who lives and works in the rural Australian settings that Wyld also covers in her work.

The Echoes might also sound like quite a dark book, and that part is true. Evie Wyld’s writing tends to be, from what I’ve seen. She grapples with the effects of trauma, so it’s kind of inescapable. It’s not all bleak, though: there is some hope in the book, and not everyone is trapped forever in the echoes of the past. But it does pose the question of how we escape from the clutches of the past when we’ve gone so far down the wrong road. Wyld weaves the personal and political together, posing the same question for the characters and for societies.

Uncle Tone often alludes to both at the same time in his drunken outbursts to a young Hannah. After an awkward attempt to acknowledge the Wongi people on whose land they now live, he then adds:

“I’m not sure if they’d have taken that deal, when we first arrived off the boats. ‘Yeah, mate, don’t worry about it. We’re here now. We’re going to take the land and murder your kids. And murder the memory that you even fucking existed. Take your language away. But it’s OK, because in about two hundredodd years a bunch of cunts in an art gallery will acknowledge you. And they’ll all feel a bit better. Deal?’”

He then refers to the schoolhouse where he now lives, putting down roots amid the bones of all the dead children in the dust.

“But even if we moved. This whole fucking place. There’s bones all over the whole fucking place. My roots shouldn’t be growing over those bones.”

Realising he’s freaked out Hannah and her sister, he goes silent and then tries to lighten the mood by shouting “Boo!” and making them jump. Then he says:

“I dunno… sorry, girls. There’s no unfucking it, is there? Once you’ve fucked it up there’s no unfucking it.”

I’m quoting from that scene at length because it seems central to the concerns of The Echoes. And it doesn’t just apply to Australia, of course. All around the world, from Gaza to Ukraine to Myanmar to the Congo to the ice shelfs of Greenland and beyond, many people have fucked up many things. I wouldn’t agree with Uncle Tone that there’s no unfucking it, but the unfucking is always much more difficult than the upfucking.

Uncle Tone is himself a deeply flawed character who has some pretty awful things done to him and does something pretty awful things to others. He is willing to talk about things that others prefer to remain silent about, but in terms of his actions, he just tends to make things a whole lot worse. He’s trapped in the echoes, and he can’t talk his way out.

As I said, though, there are glimmers of hope. It’s not all bleakness. It seems appropriate to recall the title of Wyld’s first novel: After the Fire, A Still Small Voice. Whether you call it the fire or the echoes or the fucking up, it’s extraordinarily difficult to escape from the wrongs of the past. You can’t simply pursue a faded black and white photograph and hope to turn back the clock to a time when things were better. But even in the midst of despair, there’s often a still, small voice within all of us that dares to strive for something better than what we’ve been given. And that voice is what we need to hold onto. It’s our only hope.

A quietly devastating novel about family, relationships, and ghosts. (The kind that haunt places and people who think they can be free of the past.) Set partly in Australia and partly in London, this book was unputdownable for me, beautifully written, lightened by humour and really believable relationships.

Evie Wyld’s latest novel, ‘The Echoes’ is a thoughtful, sensitive exploration of the effects of family trauma, set in London and rural Australia. Hannah believes that, if she travels to the area where her unknown grandmother lived as a child and makes a life for herself in England, away from her own family, her anxiety will quieten. However, she soon realises that escaping her past is not possible. Added to this realisation, she soon has to cope with an immediate tragedy – the death of her boyfriend, Max.
Wyld’s depiction of his ghostly presence is well-judged. The reader understands his immediate horror at what has happened, his anger at not being able to communicate with Hannah and his gradual acceptance of his dreary after-life – stuck in a grubby flat whilst she eventually moves forward. The narrative’s structure mirrors his diminishing importance and at the end of the novel he has to accept that he doesn’t know if he will stay in limbo or where his love for Hannah goes: ‘What is it? Where does it exist...There must be some sense to it, some order. Something must be coming for me. There must be a way to leave…’
In some respects, ‘The Depths’ is a meditation on death. However, more memorable is the way in which Wyld presents the strands of abuse that thread through Hannah’s family, making it almost impossible to escape from its cruel repercussions. There is no escape even when running to the other side of the world. But, maybe, naming it, facing it and challenging it brings peace. Wyld leaves us with this implication.
My thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Vintage for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.

I didn't realise there was such a stance of supernatural within this so unfortunately as that's not my type of book I couldn't really get into it. It is well written tho the writer has a nice pace and style but the plot etc was not for my tastes

Giving 5 stars for fairness I have just realised I’ve accidentally requested this book and I am not one for supernatural stories.

I am unable to fairly rate this any other way.

When Max dies, suddenly and unexpectedly, he finds himself, against his expectations and beliefs, haunting the London apartment where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. In this new reality, where physical incorporeality has been replaced with a hypersensitive sense of observation, Max follows Hannah, and starts to piece together the secrets and pains of Hannah’s upbringing in “the Echoes”, a remote outback in rural Australia. Hers is an unsavoury past which she can never really escape, notwithstanding her attempts to reinvent herself and settle down on the other side of the world.

As in her previous novel The Bass Rock, Evie Wyld borrows tropes of Gothic and supernatural fiction to convey a tale of intergenerational trauma. The Bass Rock was in essence a fiercely feminist novel, a rant against patriarchal society. The Echoes is, in my view, more ambitious. The feminism is still there, but the novel is also an indictment of historic violence against the indigenous people of Australia, whose echoes fall like a curse on the descendants of the perpetrators and on the ground where the victims are, literally, buried.

As is typical of much contemporary “literary fiction” (for want of a better term), much of the novel’s originality lies in its conscious avoidance of a linear narration. The book is divided into short segments which alternate between “After” (the sections set in the present narrated in the first person by the ghost of Max), “Before” (the sections describing the relationship between Hannah and Max in the lead up to his death, and narrated in the first person by Hannah) and “Then” (the “Australian” segments). As in a Christopher Nolan movie, the parallel timelines and quick changes in POV require concentration and sometimes may be rather hard to follow, but they also create a sense of suspense and mystery as secrets and plot twists are slowly uncovered (even the way in which Max dies is only shown to is quite late in the book).

This is an intense and gut-wrenching read, and at times feels relentlessly bleak. But, there are also flashes of humour, and the poignant ending provides a catharsis of sorts. In my view, this makes it a more rounded novel than The Bass Rock.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-echoes-by-evie-wyld.html

I love Evie Wyld's novel "The Bass Rock" so had really high expectations for "the echoes". It lost me a little in the middle, but especially the way that the author described very small, very human moments really left an impression on me.

Tough characters, tough storyline. The main character Max continues his story after death.
This is an interesting way for us to discover all of the hidden information about the characters, but it didn't work for me.
The story was well written and hard hitting. It showed how tough life can be in the UK and Australia.
I was challenged by all of the Australianisms but enjoyed the story overall.
Thank you to the author for opening my eyes about this type of life .
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This was my first Evie Wyld book and it did not disappoint. Elements of this book felt personal (I'm an Australian, living in London with partner) and the conversations, rituals of their relationship resonated with me deeply. Evie can WRITE - her voice is distinct and felt different to other authors I've been reading. She is a master at timelines and I really enjoyed this aspect of the book, albeit it being confusing at the beginning. I wasn't expecting it to end the way it did but those last 50 pages were incredibly powerful and I thought it was brilliantly done. I'm told her other works are great so this will definitely not be my last Evie Wyld novel.

This is a super novel told with multiple perspectives across different timelines and set in Australia and London. Max has died and his ghost, his spirit is watching his partner, Hannah, watching her grief and trying to find out why she was always so silent about her past and never wanted him to meet - or even speak to - her parents. Through through different voices we see the life of her grandmother and her mother where violence/trauma is suggested but never described. What the author describes is the effect of the violence. Hannah came to London to escape, her mother went to Australia, with her brother, to escape. The flat Hannah and Max live in is a couple of street away from where her grandmother lived. There are Then, Before and After 'chapters' where different voices are heard. After is Max describing his afterlife as he watches Hannah, Before is Max and Hannah's life together and Then is Hannah growing up in Australia in a place called The Echoes where there was once a school for Aboriginal girls who had been taken from their families, and the graveyard where they were buried. Echoes can also relate, I suppose, to the echoes of the generational trauma that lingers. Max's narrative is quite emotional at times, especially the final section, and as you learn about Hannah's life and the reasons for her silence, you understand the effect the echoes of the trauma suffered by her mother, her grandmother has had upon her. There was the odd moment - if I am totally honest - where I did get a little confused, but overall this is a touching read and I enjoyed - if that is the correct word considering the darkness - seeing the parts of Hannah that she had kept hidden from all around her.

Wow, this book really caught me by surprise. I was expecting to like it but wasn't expecting to love it as much as I did. It's one of the best examples of multiple POVs that I've read in a long time - maybe ever. Each narrative voice is so strong and unique that you're never lost in the story. This book is both hilarious and heartbreaking. I found the characters and the story so compelling, and the way it only lets you in slowly meant I couldn't put it down. Honestly, this might be a new favourite of mine, it was just excellent and I can't wait to get myself the physical copy when it comes out! 4.5 stars rounded up, but depending on how this stews in my bead over the next couple of weeks it may be bumped to the full 5! Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher, Jonathan Cape, for this ARC, I'm delighted I got to read it so soon!

The Echoes tells the story of Hannah's life, through multiple perspectives including her own, her dead boyfriend's and various family members'. I found it engaging, warm, sad, and thoroughly touching. I really enjoyed the split narratives and the exploration of the parts of everyone that are unknowable to the people around them.

This is a really powerful novel dissecting the relationship between Max and Hannah after his death. The movement between timelines and character development is beautiful as is the writing style

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.

Absolutely breathtaking, no-one writes about intergenerational female trauma like Evie Wyld. A truly mesmerising, powerful and heartbreaking novel. I loved how Evie used time in this novel, and she really cleverly switches between character perspectives. Brilliant, as always!