Our group meets on the fourth Wednesday of the month at 7.30pm to 9:00pm in the library or in the garden, weather permitting. For further information please contact Fiona White on 07941 634899.
There is a charge per meeting to help support the Library. Periodically one of us does a book review, see below.
Book Review
Wednesday Evening Book Group
Book Review (2025)
The Echoes by Evie Wyld
The Echoes was March’s book club read, and it was a book that elicited a lot of interesting discussion and debate amongst members. Set between Australia and London, the structure of the piece centres around Hannah and her partner Max. The sections within the book are entitled ‘Before’ which explores the relationship of the two protagonists, ‘After’ in which we experience the death of Max who then proceeds to haunt the flat he lived in with Hannah in London. There are also sections entitled ‘Then’ which flashback to Hannah’s childhood in rural Australia. We learn of Hannah’s past and meet her troubled family. Uncle Tone, her mother Kerry, father Piers and older sister Rachel all live together on The Echoes, land that itself is troubled with the past. It used to be the site of a residential school for indigenous children where they were subject to mistreatment and abuse. Ghosts exist this side of the world too.
The memories of this trauma seem to haunt the land also and yet it can also be a place of great beauty and tranquillity for Hannah, yet as a reader equipped with the knowledge of the past juxtaposed with Hannah’s self-harming in the present, the experience becomes unsettling as you anticipate all is not well. This is further compounded by Max’s death and although his haunting of the flat does provide comic relief, he finds it highly inconvenient to be a ghost, we experience the grief of Hannah in her loss and are as equally powerless to do anything but watch.
Max’s desire to finds out what happened to him and what caused his death also works to drive the narrative forward. We realise as readers that we are slowly creeping closer to finding out what happened to Hannah and her family on The Echoes and discovering the reason she ignores her mother’s letters and has lost contact with her sister. Secrets eventually do reveal themselves in poignant and emotive ways. Despite the trauma that has been experienced by characters there is also much that is positive and funny in this book.
The Echoes then, explores history, narratives (who gets to tell these narratives and who doesn’t) and trauma but also one offers a quietly hopeful ending. Members within the group discussed that it made them think of other themes such as colonialisation, racism and how countries grapples with these ‘echoes’ of the past. Everyone enjoyed the challenge of reading the book despite the heavy content and difficult nature of some of the subject matter.