Part Ghost Story, Part Love Story, Part Multigenerational Saga
The past few weeks have been a wild time in the Winchester household. But while the world has spun around me, I found my way to books. One of them is The Echoes, a book that made big waves last year from across the pond. The author, Evie Wyld, has won the Stella Prize, Miles Franklin Literary Award, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Betty Task Prize, and the European Union Prize for Literature. It’s about time that America got on board!
The Echoes by Evie Wyld
From the first line, I was hooked: “I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has been something of a problem.” Max is a ghost haunting the apartment where he used to live with his girlfriend, Hannah. He’s not sure how he died. He just knows that he’s here, watching Hannah live her life without him. But there was a lot he didn’t know about her. While Hannah has lived in the UK for years, she’s originally from Australia. Despite his pushing to visit, she refuses to return to Australia or reconnect with her estranged family.
But Hannah is haunted by more than just Max. Over the course of the novel, we jump back into Hannah’s childhood and learn more about the family she traveled across the world to leave behind. As Hannah’s story unfolds, we see the complex web of her extended family, who are connected to the grounds of a former residential school.
The Echoes is a character-driven novel that examines the ripples of choices made by one generation that impact their descendants for years to come. Wyld’s characters come alive on the page. Their relationships are filled with tiny details that make them seem so real. Every chapter reveals a new layer to Hannah’s story.
The audiobook is performed by Sebastian Humphreys and Vivien Carter. Together they give such emotional depth to the characters. Humphreys turns Max’s first-person narration into a beautiful performance of a man lost in time. Carter performs all of Hannah’s family’s perspectives. She creates such an atmosphere of rural Australia, the isolation that Hannah’s family experiences and how that impacts their mental states.
The Echoes is an intimate look at a family with a complex history…It’s part ghost story, part love story, part multigenerational saga. It’s a gripping tale that I will be thinking about for a long time.
That’s it for this week! You can find me over on my substack Winchester Ave or over on Instagram @kdwinchester. As always, feel free to drop me a line at kendra.d.winchester@gmail.com. For even MORE bookish content, you can find my articles over on Book Riot.
