Violence and desire

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’.

A past whose vestiges infect the present moment is a recurring motif in Wyld’s writing. Her previous novels – After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009), All the Birds, Singing (2013), winner of the Miles Franklin Award, and The Bass Rock (2020) – braid two or more timelines, demonstrating how knots of violence and desire snarl each new generation of a family; how long-held secrets cast protracted shadows.