Evie Wyld’s fourth novel, The Echoesis by turns exquisite and frustrating. It revolves around the world of Hannah, a white Australian in her 30s who lives in a South London flat that she now unknowingly shares with the ghost of her boyfriend Max. Bound to her former home, Max is a ghostly narrator forced to watch Hannah move on. Wyld shines in her compassionate and comic observations of human foibles.

The plot alternates between glimpses of Hannah’s teenage years in the Australian outback and her adult life before and after Max’s death. Wyld’s compelling characters use shifting perspectives to shape our understanding of Hannah’s complicated, painful childhood, and to reveal the relatives and secrets she desperately hid.

We reconstruct Hannah’s early life in rural Australia, in a family home on stolen land called ‘The Echoes’. Her house was adjacent to a boarding school where many Aboriginal Australian children were forcibly interned after the colonial power abducted thousands of children from their families and wiped out Aboriginal communities through the brutal abuse of ‘re-education’.

Hannah’s parents refuse to confront the school’s barbaric legacy – and their own guilt. White people’s avoidance of responsibility is a key mechanism in Wyld’s plot. And yet there is a danger that this story will be bypassed by the actions of the main characters. There are many ghosts in this book, but only some are allowed to speak. Still. The Echoes is an ambitious, often brave novel in fractal form that gives voice to suffering that resonates across generations.

“The Echoes” by Evie Wyld is out now (Jonathan Cape, £18.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue Shop on bookshop.org, which supports The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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