'Set between rural Australia and London, The Echoes is a story about the weight of the past and the promise of the future
'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.' (Publication summary)
Evie Wyld Is Having More Fun Than You Think
Michael Williams
(interviewer),
2024
28523976
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'Evie Wyld writes dark and often trauma-informed books, but she also has a remarkable capacity to capture the tenderness of memory. Her novels have been a critical and commercial success, with her second, All The Birds Singing, winning the Miles Franklin and her third, The Bass Rock, taking home the 2021 Stella Prize. This week, Michael sits down with Evie for a conversation about her latest book The Echoes, which explores how we tell stories around, and into the absences that define us.' (Production summary)
'When we first meet Max in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes, he is dead. He does not believe in ghosts, he tells us, yet that it precisely what he is: ‘a transparent central nervous system floating about like a jellyfish’. Max lingers in the house he shared with his partner, Hannah. He tries to make his presence felt, to signal to Hannah that he is still there, but he lacks any supernatural ability. Hannah moves on with her life, and all Max can do is ‘watch as the flat becomes the home of others – the moths, the spiders, the silverfish, the dust motes and … the leftovers of the dead’.' (Introduction)
'Family secrets unravel after death and the haunting of the afterlife.'
'When you pick up a book by the British-Australian author Evie Wyld you can be certain of a couple of things: It's going to be creepy, and it's going to be good.'
'Weather, beasts and death. That’s what Hannah’s mother writes of in the letters she sends. They arrive in London from Australia and Hannah ignores them for as long as she can. “Every time a letter from her arrives, I lose my breath, as though some tiny venomous bug might spring from it. [The letter] has sat unopened since I brought it upstairs, stuffed into the cupboard next to the fuse box where I don’t have to look at it. But I feel it like a heat from the corner of the room.”' (Introduction)
'When you pick up a book by the British-Australian author Evie Wyld you can be certain of a couple of things: It's going to be creepy, and it's going to be good.'
'Family secrets unravel after death and the haunting of the afterlife.'
'When we first meet Max in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes, he is dead. He does not believe in ghosts, he tells us, yet that it precisely what he is: ‘a transparent central nervous system floating about like a jellyfish’. Max lingers in the house he shared with his partner, Hannah. He tries to make his presence felt, to signal to Hannah that he is still there, but he lacks any supernatural ability. Hannah moves on with her life, and all Max can do is ‘watch as the flat becomes the home of others – the moths, the spiders, the silverfish, the dust motes and … the leftovers of the dead’.' (Introduction)
Evie Wyld Is Having More Fun Than You Think
Michael Williams
(interviewer),
2024
28523976
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'Evie Wyld writes dark and often trauma-informed books, but she also has a remarkable capacity to capture the tenderness of memory. Her novels have been a critical and commercial success, with her second, All The Birds Singing, winning the Miles Franklin and her third, The Bass Rock, taking home the 2021 Stella Prize. This week, Michael sits down with Evie for a conversation about her latest book The Echoes, which explores how we tell stories around, and into the absences that define us.' (Production summary)
