The Echoes by Evie Wyld:

Hannah and Max’s relationship was never great, but now Max is dead, still present in the flat, watching his partner, waiting for the purgatory to end.  It’s a tricksy book stylistically, it works best in the chapters where Max is present, watching insects and feeling the presence of everyone who has/ever will live in the flat and seeing Hannah move on in life. 

Stylistically, it moves between this and Hannah’s life in late 90’s Australia.  And there’s enough bogans, op shops and Anzac biscuits to satisfy nostalgia freaks.  Literary readers will enjoy the overarching concept that the eponymous Echoes is the housing estate teenage Hannah lives on, but is also the afterlife that Max lives in and also partially what indigenous Australians call The Dreamtime.  

Tonally though, the book seems to suffer from an uneven, emotionally shifting and often jarring tone.  It’s meta enough to reference Ghost, Ghostbusters, Truly, Madly, Deeply and Ted Hughes’ poem Anniversary.  However, the sly wink of the short story Hannah works on in Uni - resembling Wyld’s best-known novel All The Birds, Singing - seems a little too cute for its own good. See also, Hannah’s mental health crisis portrayed with great dignity, Max’s death played for laughs.  

It’s a novel that Sunday supplements will love, but personally, I found it too erratic to be truly beautiful.  It’s published by Penguin on August 1st and I thank them for a preview copy.