Cirrus@Austlit

'Set in a near future where 50-degree summers bully the horizon, Briohny Doyle’s second novel, Echolalia, sprawls among psychothriller, crime, speculative and literary fiction to make a highly original mark on the publishing landscape as she wrestles with and departs from the tropes of those genres. The Cormac family are the owners of a small property empire in the fictional town of Shorehaven, where a lake is slowly drying up. When Emma, an interior architecture trainee ‘of no social pedigree’ marries into the family, she gives birth to three children whom she struggles to care for next to her aloof husband and antagonistic in-laws. The increasing pressures around her culminate in psychological collapse and she commits infanticide. These schisms build up over 26 chapters, each one sign-posted by ‘Before’ and ‘After’; through this split structure, Doyle creates an unnerving dissonance in showing how past and present actions seal the fate of future generations in a rapidly changing climate.' (Introduction)