The award-winning novelist Evie Wyld joined us via Zoom in 2020 for the covid version Festilitt, and we’re thrilled to welcome her in person to Parisot this year, with her fourth novel, The Echoes.
It’s the story of Hannah, an Australian who lives in London with her boyfriend Max, who has just died, and who tells us in the opening line: “I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem.” His ghost gets to hang around their flat and see how Hannah copes, or not, with his death, but he gets no answers to questions that have dogged their relationship – why she has never introduced him to her family, why she is reluctant to commit, why she is not pursuing her writing career, instead working in a pub.
With quirky humour as well as piercing insight and compassion, Evie explores how Hannah’s past growing up next to an old colonial reform school echoes through her life with Max, despite all her efforts to escape it. And it’s a difficult past, shot through with complexity and trauma in her immediate family and in society more broadly.