I've thoroughly enjoyed John Boyne's other books so this departure from his usual style took me by surprise. I couldn't quite decide whether I liked it or not!
The story centres on the lunacy of social media and how it can take over and destroy lives. Topical and entertaining. But the humour was juvenile at best and not particularly well written. Honestly, I was a bit disappointed by this book.

DNF — unfortunately I was unable to finish this novel. This has nothing to do with the quality of the writing or the content of the novel, merely my own inability. I am incredibly grateful to have received an advance copy and will absolutely sit down with it and finish it one day. Thank you for trusting me with this advance copy, and I hope to review it soon.

John Boyne’s latest, “The Echo Chamber”, is an intense satire about the digital life. We follow every member of the rich and well-known Cleverley family on their individual paths, all mostly documented on social media.

George the father is having an affair, Beverley the wife is chasing a younger man, Nelson the son has issues with women, and Elizabeth the daughter is a troll on social media. That’s perhaps the quickest sum of it and everything is so centered around social media that it might as well be the fifth most important character.

I have always enjoyed John Boyne’s writing and his ability to craft a super engaging story. But this time I struggled to finish this book. It has his characteristic wit and an interesting enough overall storyline. It also addresses a very relevant topic – the toxicity of social media and the way it can wreck us.

Sadly though it stops there. I couldn’t identify with any of the characters, which was a first for a John Boyne novel. His characters are usually very finely drawn with much depth. Here, though, they were shallow and unpleasant, which, to be fair, I can attribute to the theme of the novel. But I wish that we were shown a different side to them that would perhaps explain why they were the way they were.

And the thing that really got under my skin – the constant reiteration of how bad social media can be. Boyne also pokes fun at terms like ‘woke,’ ‘cancelling’, and other cultural changes in recent times. It’s the point of the whole book, yes, but when you read about it on literally every page it gets tiring after a while.

All in all, I’d say this had its moments and I just wish there were more of those. Thanks to DoubleDay publishing for my ARC.

This is such a clever book, showing how easy it is to become wrapped up in social media and it's rather empty feedback. It reflects on how homogenised opinions have become as a result and how fleeting attention to continual scandal is impacting on the way we think.
The story zips along and is genuinely funny and relatable. A great satire on the social age.

Farcical and ridiculous and yet still strangely believable and often hilarious.

The Cleverley family consist of stalwart of British TV George, writer Beverley and their three grown children Nelson, Elizabeth and Achilles. They live a life of privilege but barely notice as their constantly sharing about what their doing on social media. Well apart from Nelson who has his own issues. But celebrities and their kin are always just want tweet or Insta post away from controversy. And one well meant but wrongly worded tweet from George is about cause chaos for the whole family.

I usually dislike books where pretty much all the characters are hard to.like or sympathise with. But I belly laughed through this simply because:

1. It's very funny
2. It's just so bloody true!

As someone like who considers myself a liberal I often look around and wonder when we became the book burners. And opinion quashers. And although I couldn't like him I understood George's frustrations. And this book sets all that crazy cancel culture firmly in its sight and rips the pee out of it completely. And for that I loved it.

I’m still pretty new to John Boyne, having previously only read The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and The Heart’s Invisible Furies. I loved those books and blindly went into The Echo Chamber expecting more of the same. However, John Boyne is no one-trick pony.

The Echo Chamber is a witty, satirical story that pokes fun of contemporary topics last like cancel culture, while also opening an conversation about these same topics that get people riled up. The book also has a wonderful selection of well-thought out characters – even if they are totally obnoxious.

Yet, The Echo Chamber wasn’t for me.

While I understand why many people have enjoyed this book, it was a bit too much for me. The characters and the satire were too much for me, while the storyline wasn’t enough. I was waiting for something big to happen and, when I realised half way though of wasn’t, I lost interest and started skimming through.

I can’t recommend The Echo Chamber but I can recommend John Boyne. This experience won’t stop me from picking up his other books though.

Quirky 'Woke' satire, so lovely to see Boyne's funny side.

Usually when I read a Kindle book, I'll have a half dozen paragraphs highlighted as I go along, so I remember favourite quotes when it comes time to write down my thoughts.

This now looks like my GCSE copy of Mockingbird! More highlights than regular text. I chuckled throughout, even snorted a few times, and found this a total tonic.

I see the name 'Boyne' and these days brace for bittersweet pain and family tribulation, tears and toil and epic sagas. So to find myself embroiled in a ridiculous social-media satire, with authorial digs at Woke, at Twitter trolls, at celebrity, at almost all aspects of contemporary digital and consumer life, well, it was an absolute pleasure to relax and just laugh along.

The whole plot centres on one family, the Cleverleys (and you wouldn't believe my laugh when I realised the mum's name of Beverley was quite so amusing). Dad George is a long-standing BBC host, having an affair with a younger woman. Mum Beverley is a 'writer' (well, she comes up with the ideas, her ghosts do the actual writing), having an affair with her younger Strictly partner. Their three adult live-at-home children are various shades of weird-slash-entitled. Nelson is a teacher who likes to dress in uniforms, Elizabeth trolls Twitter personalities and dates the most Woke man in the Universe who 'appreciates' her and helps the homeless for likes. And young Achilles is saving up - by blackmailing older men for money.

They are a toxic bunch, yet they remain family. Boyne has a field day mocking them, mocking those they mock. Just spewing Mockery and Sarcasm on today's world in general, and being very much 'of the moment'. Eldest son Nelson exemplifies this in his therapy session:
"'Remember how we talked about not confusing real life and movies?' said Dr Oristo. 'Yes, but I thought this might be one of the occasions where films were based on true events. Like Titanic or Gandhi or Avengers: Endgame.'"

There is mockery at Republicans, Prince Andrew, Jesus. The young and the old are both shown in equally appalling, self-obsessed lights. We shake our heads at cancel culture and smack our foreheads at the calculation of appropriate Twitter like-to-post ratios.

Loved it all. No one character is completely sympathetic, and every one of them is a product of the modern world we've all fallen into.

One of the funniest books I've read in a while. Lovely to be reminded of Boyne's comic capabilities so strongly. And not to cry for a change!

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample reading copy.

John Boyne has definitely cemented himself as one of my favourite authors with this book!

This book contains so many unlikable characters but the way John Boyne writes them makes you invested in how they get on in life - you cringe, you are embarrassed for them and look forward to them getting their just desserts eventually.

The Echo Chamber is a brilliant study of how social media can take over our lives - how it begins to control us and have an influence on the decisions we make. All five members of the Cleverley family - George, Beverley, Nelson, Elizabeth and Achillies - have different relationships with various forms of social media, being on the receiving end of being cancelled and being the ones sending the abusive messages. I loved reading about their naivety and seeing how different generations looked at the world of social media in different ways.

I loved every page - it was an absorbing, engrossing and deeply funny read. Definitely will be recommending it to lots of people!

Rollicking read that sometimes cuts so close to the bone that it make you wince. I found it laugh-out-loud in places and certainly enjoyed another opportunity to languish in Boyne’s storytelling but wish I hadn’t been aware of the online spats that obviously inspired this tale and these characters as I felt it made me far too aware of the presence of the author - a distraction that for me risks destroying the joy of a novel.

An extremely funny story about a family who somehow manage to live their lives without communicating with each other. It is the emerging overlap of their secrets that provides the entertainment. Marital affairs with two-timing lovers isn't likely to end well. Suppressed sexual leanings, unrecognised psychological issues and even the tragedy that befalls a tortoise all guarantee continued chaos in the Cleverley household.
But it is the father, George Cleverley, who suffers the biggest train crash with his tendency to put his foot in it by making remarks that end up doing the rounds on Facebook and Twitter - not to mention being quoted in the tabloid press. George, for someone who is really quite clever, displays extraordinary ignorance of the power of these media streams and, as a result is genuinely surprised when he finds his hugely successful career, as a chat show host, under serious risk.
However, all's well that ends well, and John Boyne somehow manages to produce this from a story that is tangled beyond belief. Enjoyable stuff!

Loved this novel! Lots of laugh out loud moments plus many too realistic cringe moments! Can’t wait to see it dramatised!

I thoroughly enjoyed The Echo Chamber, another fantastic novel from one of my favourites, John Boyne.

The perfect blend of wit, sarcasm, relateable life scenarios and diverse characters. The rise of social media and the impact it has on one family is at the forefront of the story line. The different generations of the family provide real humour but also some important lessons on society today and the pitfalls of a social media presence -whether that be your own, or other peoples.

What I loved most about this was that as the reader you had more information on how the plot was unfolding than the characters did...I knew it would all come to a head but I had no idea when it would all be revealed and more entertainingly, how it would happen. It kept me hooked and laughing out loud on many an occasion.

Highly recommend it!

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John Boyne's ability to span genres is always impressive. Another compelling read with unforgettable characters. A hilarious portrayal of today's landscape.

How can you not love a book with a character called "Beverly Cleverly" ?

John Boyne does it again, dark humour, so much in these stories, in the characters. You can see them, smell them, it feels like I am in the room when I read his books. Every line is thought out and reads deliciously!

An absolute belter yet again !

John Boyne is such a literary chameleon. He’s been John Irving (The Heart’s Invisible Furies), Patricia Highsmith (A Ladder to the Sky) and David Mitchell (A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom). Now, with this Internet-age state-of-the-nation satire featuring variously abhorrent characters, he’s channelling the likes of Jamie Attenberg, Jonathan Coe, Patricia Lockwood, Lionel Shriver and Emma Straub.

Every member of the Cleverley family is a morally compromised fake. Parents George and Beverley are a BBC chat show host and romance novelist (of ghostwritten books), respectively; their three children, ranging from their late teens to early twenties, all still live at home. Nelson is a teacher but dons scrubs or a policeman uniform in public and to his therapy sessions. Elizabeth is an “influencer” who makes a habit of ‘speaking truth to power’ in the form of abusive tweets from an anonymous account. Achilles is a con artist in the making, targeting middle-aged men through a dating app and then extorting money from them. Boyne gives each character amusing tics, like Beverley’s habit of starting lots of sentences with “Speaking as a mother,” even when what follows is a total non sequitur. There are also some tremendously funny set pieces, such as Nelson’s speed dating escapade and George’s public outbursts.

Boyne links several storylines through the character of Pylyp, who’s slept with almost every character in the book and asks Beverley to petsit for his tortoise, Ustym Karmaliuk (named after a Ukrainian folk hero). The tortoise, fed exclusively on After Eight chocolate mints, provides additional comic fodder.

We’re starting to see what happened when authors were writing just before the pandemic and then had to scurry to add in references to Covid, as in Beautiful World, Where Are You. Here the few mentions of social distancing and vaccination feel shoehorned in.

What is Boyne spoofing here? Mostly smartphone addiction, but also cancel culture. The fact that George is incredibly woke about Black Lives Matter but still manages to have a massive blindspot when it comes to how to talk about trans and disabled people (especially given that Boyne received flak for how he wrote a trans character) is, I think, meant to show how easy it is to make career-ending mistakes in a culture where everyone is poised to find offence and express indignation – Boyne dubs these the POOTs, or “Permanently Outraged of Twitter.”

The humour is very broad in places, relying on stereotypes – from the characters’ names alone, you know that Boyne is hamming it up. I didn’t particularly like the characterization of Wilkes as a self-aware do-gooder and dirty hippy, for instance. I don’t know how well the book will translate outside the UK as certain jokes, e.g. a minor character lusting after Jacob Rees-Mogg or the rundown of news sources’ biases, won’t make sense if you don’t know the context. As a sort of in-joke, Boyne refers back to Maude Avery from THIF; she’s also mentioned in Ladder.

I imagined George as Hugh Bonneville throughout; indeed, the novel would lend itself very well to screen adaptation. And I loved how Beverley’s new ghostwriter, never given any name beyond “the ghost,” feels like the most real and perceptive character of all.

Surely one of the funniest books I will read this year.

A couple of favourite quotes:

Beverley: “We live in a world where it’s basically become more difficult not to contact someone than it is to contact them.” – which is why I’m so miffed every time I send a gift and it’s not acknowledged; thank-you notes are no longer de rigueur etiquette; I’m not asking for handwriting on stationery here – a one-line text or e-mail or Facebook message will do!

Of Elizabeth: “Why, she asked herself, did she not feel validated as a human being unless strangers were listening to her, commenting on her, liking her? This small piece of plastic and computer circuitry sitting before her had taken control over her life. Would she even exist if it didn’t?”

I laughed so much reading this that I think the man next to me on the plane must have been concerned. This is an unapologetically old fogey rant on wokeness and cancel culture on social media told through a parable of a family of posh fools with various levels of good intention. ⁣
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The patriarch is George, a Graham Norton type BBC host, who gets himself into some very hot water when he accidentally dead names and misgenders his lawyer’s transitioning secretary on Twitter. His wife Beverley, the most irritating and unsympathetic of the lot, is ostensibly (only ostensibly, because she really deploys ghost writers) a writer of romance novels all involving fair maidens and secret billionaire doctors in a variety of locations. She is having an affair with her Ukrainian Strictly Come Dancing partner and pet sitting his tortoise named after the great Ukrainian folk hero Ustym Karmaliuk, who she feeds After Eights. Their eldest son Nelson is a teacher with crippling social anxiety whose coping mechanism is to wear uniforms (doctor, policeman, construction worker), their daughter Elizabeth is an aspiring influencer with a secret troll Twitter account on the side called @TruthisaSword, and their youngest son Achilles has made £35k conning men on sugar daddy websites. ⁣
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There is a lot going on and it is very ridiculous, but a complete riot and the perfect undemanding read to end off a holiday!
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#TheEchoChamber #JohnBoyne

As a fan of John Boyne, I was excited to read this book. I instantly enjoyed his very witty writing style, and his quirky characters. The book shifts between voices and story lines, which keeps the reader engaged throughout. With some genuinely laugh-out-loud bits in the book, on the whole I found the premise a little too obviously reactionary to the perceived "woke culture" of the younger generation. I would recommend this book to anyone who is after a funny summer read.

It's taken me a little while to get to reading the Echo Chamber and I'm sorry I hadn't done so until now. I've previously loved John Boyne's books and admit to having taken a peek at the reviews for this one prior to release and can recall them being varied with some discussion about people not appreciating the humour, that people didn't appreciate the references to Mr Boyne's own experiences within the twittersphere, and that people felt this book was un-Boyne-ish.

The book introduces a highly unlikeable and dysfunctional family - the Cleverley family. There's George a 60 something, staid but thinks he's a woke and cool customer, who's having an affair with a psychotherapist 22 years his junior. There's Beverley (yep, Beverley Cleverley) a novelist who uses a ghost writer who we know only as ghost throughout the book. Beverley is also having an affair with a Ukrainian dancer Pylyp who she met on a Dancing with the Stars TV show. Pylyp has worked his way through Beverley, and two of her children (Unbeknownst to all of them, of course). Nelson is the oldest son, who begins the book as virgin, in therapy as he has trouble with women, and a penchant for dressing up, purporting to be someone he actually isn't. Elizabeth is a time-wasting, privileged do-nothinger who thinks she wants to travel to cure leprosy with her boyfriend of the great unwashed variety. Achilles, the youngest child is 17 years of age and content on fleecing unsuspecting men he meets on dating apps of thousands of pounds. A truly delightful family really .... so, well normal (insert satire).

What follows are at times bizarre situations the various family members find themselves in both professionally and personally, and bound within these situations and circumstances is commentary on societal norms, cultural expectations, social media and concepts such as cancel culture and wokeness. The narrative is chaotic and mind-bending, and at times I wasn't really aware what on earth was going on. There were linkages between characters where you later go Aha and some I'm still scratching my head about the purpose. This is despite the book leading to a convergence of all the family members in one place at the end for a "big reveal".

The Echo Chamber is HEAVILY laced with satire and I ranged from having a quiet chuckle to visibly recoiling, mainly at George and Beverley and the things they said and did. I'm not sure it will work for everyone, and I think other people might view it as a tad cliched. I think it was an interesting look at the ways in which people seek or attract attention, and not in the most positive ways.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC of the Echo Chamber.

I really don't know what to write about this book which I reeived as an ARC from Netgalley. I have read other books by this author notably The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the The Heart's Invisible Furies. This book is like chalk and cheese to the others and yet the more i think the more i see some similarities.

The echo chamber follows the almost total disintegration of the Cleverly family over the course of one week. Their obsession with social media and maintaining a presence in that world leads them to extreme behaviour. The book seems to be predominantly character driven and not one of those characters are in any way likeable. The author has shaped them on the edge of extremism, almost as caricatures or spitting image puppets. Their characterisation drives the narrative.

There were times when i became frustrated with the way the characters and their stories were developing and yet I cannot say I disliked the book. I will certainly remember its content and underlying narrative. I thought the ending was extremely clever pulling me quickly back in. It has humour and cynicism in equal measure and is a good window on the world of social media

I would probably rate it 3.5 stars but don't think i can go as far as 4

My first read by John Boyne was an absolute comedy delight. A 'laugh out loud' experience that I enjoyed immensely. But, it was also relevant, ironic., and a scary reminder of just how dependent, obsessed and addicted we are as a culture to our smart devices. The characters were spoiled and pampered, and behaved badly, but I couldn't help feeling some empathy for their escalating situations and naivety.. I definitely plan to read more by this author.