The Echoes - Evie Wyld

The Echoes by Evie Wyld, acclaimed author of The Bass Rock, is a bold, lyrical, and deeply haunting exploration of love, loss, and the secrets we carry. A story that moves across time and continents, it examines the fragile bonds of intimacy and the weight of what remains unsaid.

At its heart lies the story of Max and Hannah. After his sudden death, Max lingers as a reluctant ghost, unable to move on. From the flat they once shared, he watches Hannah, his grief-stricken girlfriend, as she struggles with both his absence and the shadows of her past. In death, Max begins to see the parts of Hannah’s life that were invisible to him before, realizing how much he never truly understood.

In the months before Max’s passing, Hannah had been fleeing secrets from her life in Australia. Her relationship with Max offered hope of a new beginning, a way to rewrite her story. But the past refuses to remain buried, and as memories surface, the fractures in their love become unavoidable.

Evie Wyld weaves a tale that is at once a ghost story, a love story, and a meditation on grief, memory, and the unspoken truths that shape us.

Main Themes of the Book

• Love and Loss: Exploring how love endures, even after death.
• Secrets and Memory: The ways in which the past resurfaces, haunting the present.
• Grief and Healing: The struggle to reconcile absence and presence.
• Ghostly Intimacy: A spectral love story where the boundaries of life and death blur.
• Identity and Escape: The search for new beginnings against the weight of old wounds.

Why You Should Read This Book by Evie Wyld

• From award-winning author Evie Wyld, known for her rich, evocative storytelling.
• A rare blend of ghost story and love story, deeply moving and unforgettable.
• Offers a poignant reflection on what remains unspoken in relationships.
• Perfect for fans of literary fiction, haunting narratives, and lyrical prose.
• A novel that stays with you, asking timeless questions about love, loss, and memory.

The Echoes is a masterfully written novel that lingers like the very memories it explores. Both heartbreaking and beautiful, it captures the ghostly resonance of love lost and the inescapable echoes of the past. Evie Wyld once again proves her brilliance in weaving stories that are as haunting as they are human.

Reviews

• The Echoes is a masterly achievement, a work of skill and subtle empathy that really earns our attention. It will linger with me for a very long time - Sunday Times
• Precise and unforgiving… 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 - Guardian
• 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 wit of Evie Wyld is on sparkling display in the first line of her unsettling fourth novel… compulsively readable… 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 - Financial Times
• It takes brilliance and verve to leap into the darkness as Evie Wyld does here. What a discovery - this is the first book of her books I have read; it will certainly not be the last - Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren
• Unsettling, vivid, and beautifully written - Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
• A stunning, immersive work of sharp prose, weaving intergenerational trauma and a ghost story and the complexities of love and families. Wyld gets better with each novel - Sinéad Gleeson, author of Hagstone
• 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, author of The Girl on the Train
• 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, author of Harmless Like You
• Evie Wyld is a true powerhouse, her latest novel The Echoes is unflinching in its exploration of loss, grief, historical trauma and complex relationships and families. This is an utterly compelling, vivid and powerful novel, it contains courageous love and truth, stunning fearless writing, outstanding story telling and a tremendous intimacy, this book holds a voice that sings and stays with you, haunting you, long after you have read the last page - Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death