‘The Echoes’ refers to many things in this book: the name of a rural Australian town from the main character’s past; the ghost of her dead boyfriend in her apartment; the way her family seems to constantly perpetuate cycles of trauma and abuse, only broken by her choice to have an abortion. These are the themes – death and abuse and personhood and cycles – that make their home within this novel.

Hannah moves from her rural Australian childhood to London in her 20s, finding an apartment on the same street her grandmother migrated from almost a century beforehand. In London, she takes up and quits writing, meets her boyfriend Max and loses her boyfriend Max, gets pregnant and ends the pregnancy. Echo and response, echo and response. Although Max dies, he never leaves their apartment – unbeknownst to Hannah, his ghost remains, watching her and narrating her story while still not understanding her. Hannah refuses to be understood – by her mum, whose letters she won’t return; by Max; by the reader. She is haunted by more than just Max; even in chapters that Hannah narrates, she refuses to reveal more than is necessary, and does not mention her past. This past is only filled in through chapters from the perspective of the people she has left – her mother, father, uncle, sister – who slowly and fragmentarily reveal themselves and Hannah, along with all the patterns and echoes they cannot and will not break.

This novel left me gasping, devastated, and better for it. It is a ghost story – and not just of Max, but also of Hannah, of every character that breathes life into its pages – as Evie Wyld reveals the ghosts of who they could have become, who they once were, who they may yet dare to be. In Wyld’s world, you do not have to be dead to be a ghost, to be an echo. Wyld’s genius is inimitable, heralding a new era of Australian Gothic.