The sins of the mother are visited upon the children
The Echoes is many things in Evie Wyld’s new novel. It is the rural backwater in Australia where Hannah grew up, and it is also the shape of the book, as the past reverberates down the generations. Philip Larkin said that man hands on misery to man, but for Evie it is mothers who seem to do this. Among the achievements of her novel is to show why they do it and make them sympathetic.
And there’s another echo. When the novel opens Hannah has made a life for herself in London after returning to the area where her grandmother lived as a child. But her London boyfriend Max has been killed in a road accident, and rather to his surprise he finds himself a ghost, haunting the flat where they lived. But as the book progresses, we learn that this isn’t really Max’s novel, it is Hannah’s, and that of her family torn apart by the echoes of the past. We met Evie in a delightful café in South London, very close to where the novel is set, and the day was so lovely that we sat outside for our discussion.
Evie Wyld – Jonathan Cape – £18.99
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