The Echoes

It takes brilliance and verve to leap into the darkness as Evie Wyld does here. What a discovery – this is the first of her books I have read; it will certainly not be the last. - Anne Enright

The Echoes is a gorgeous, wise, furious meditation on the ways in which we carry both love and pain across decades and hemispheres. Each new layer is a revelation of compassion and understanding. Wyld is brilliant on girlhood, on grief, on intimacy’s terrible costs and its funny, messy grace. This is a jewel of a novel. - Fiona McFarlane

A brilliant, satisfying novel that explores flinty and essential truths about love and loss. Full of complex, believable characters and grounded in the mysteries and frustrations of the living and the dead. Flawlessly written, intriguing and ambitious. It moved me very much. - Sharlene Teo

A story about humans as they are – complicated bundles of pain, love, cruelty, cowardice, tenderness, bravery, loyalty. When the world is encouraging us to see each other as one dimensional, complex characters like those in The Echoes are necessary. And on top of all that Wyld is funny. - Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

I’ve loved all of Evie Wyld’s novels, but I think this may be my favourite. Like all the best ghost stories, The Echoes is also a love story. It’s funny and moving and has such intelligent things to say about family, about shared histories and grief and the ways people find to heal themselves. - Paula Hawkins

I swallowed it all in one sitting, then went back to re-read all the passages and sentences I'd underlined. I knew I would love it, but wow – what an achievement. The way Evie effortlessly moves through times, places and people with a relentless, brutal, compassionate attention, her control over detail, emotion, and plot – the way we understand the personal through the local and the historical: I was just in awe of this (and as usual, very envious of Evie's skill). - Jenn Ashworth

This is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before... This is a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious. - Observer, Books to Look Out For 2024

The Echoes is a masterpiece, truly a special book. Wyld just gets better and better. - Nikesh Shukla

The loudest quiet book I’ve ever read, or the quietest loud book. Ghosts – but not the horrific kind – and death and family and ancestry and what’s passed down and what’s shucked off and how we move on from anything at all. Read it. Read it. Read it. - J. P. Smythe

A strange and wondrous novel, my book of the year by a mile. Wyld is a literary magician, doing more in the space of a few pages than many authors manage over the course of their careers. - Alex Preston

Wyld has always excelled at tension and pace, and the scattered puzzle pieces drop into place with both a feeling of horror and a strange kind of satisfaction . . . Nobody writes about trauma like Wyld. She does this largely by not writing directly about it, either transforming it into metaphor, or focusing only on its after effects, or both . . . Yet as well as terror The Echoes is also suffused with love, from the deep bond between Hannah and Rachel to the consoling and celebratory love of female friends, and the imperfect, wavering but ultimately lasting love between Hannah and Max. It is also – and this is important – a deeply funny book . . . The last, lingering voices in the novel hint at healing – and at hope. - Melissa Harrison, Guardian

Wyld, who describes all of these horrors allusively, is an expert at withholding information until it can be delivered with maximum impact. What shines through is the extraordinary resilience of a character such as Kerry, who has internalised her trauma to such an extent that it comes out in the cakes that she bakes for her family . . . In spite of its dark material, Wyld makes The Echoes compulsively readable through the impressionistic and often humorous ways she conjures her characters’ inner lives . . . Wyld is in complete control of each timeframe and narrative vantage point so as to create a seemingly inevitable domino effect of behaviour. The horror that Wyld expresses on a micro level is also reflected in a macro one that looks unflinchingly at the colonisation of Australia, in particular the treatment of Indigenous girls who were forcibly taken from their families from the mid-1800s up to the 1970s . . . Wyld is an uncommonly sensorial writer, relentless in the ways that she captures the bodily disgust of abusive behaviour and the burning desire to break its hereditary cycle. - Tobias Grey, Financial Times

This novel left me gasping, devastated, and better for it. It is a ghost story – and not just of Max, but also of Hannah, of every character that breathes life into its pages – as Evie Wyld reveals the ghosts of who they could have become, who they once were, who they may yet dare to be. In Wyld’s world, you do not have to be dead to be a ghost, to be an echo. Wyld’s genius is inimitable, heralding a new era of Australian Gothic. - Teddy Peak, Readings