“I’m clearly English,” Evie Wyld says via Zoom from her home in London, her accent supporting the statement. Still, it’s Australia that fills her books, and as a child, filled her dreams.
Wyld’s Australian mother came to England in the late ’60s and met her English father. The couple’s plan was to return to Australia, Wyld says, but her father “couldn’t really hack” the county, so they stayed in England. “That’s where an awful lot of my writing has come from—that feeling of homesickness in her, such an interesting, difficult emotion.”
Growing up, Wyld visited Australia often and recalls yearning for the country. “As a child, I would daydream about it,” she says. “I still have very sensory memories of the place. I can close my eyes and walk through my grandparents’ sugarcane farm and see it all.”
In addition to an Australian element, readers of Wyld’s books can also expect mystery, remote landscapes, multiple generations, time shifts, and an exploration of trauma and violence. All of which are on display in her new novel, The Echoes (Knopf, Feb.), which follows a ghost, Max, who hovers around the apartment he shared in London with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah. The novel shifts between different periods and settings, including an isolated tract of land in Australia called the Echoes, where a school of the same name once existed for the forced reeducation of Indigenous children.
“A number of things inspired this book,” Wyld says. “Partly I started to write it in the first lockdown in the U.K. when people important to me were dying, so a lot of the book is about that feeling of being trapped, which is sort of where the ghost came from. I wanted that feeling of what if we just had these four walls and that was the amount of life we could experience? It got me thinking that the only way out of a good marriage or relationship is if one of you dies and the other one watches. I wanted to explore all the layers of that and all the stuff you don’t know about the other person.”
Born in London in 1980, Wyld was the youngest of two children. Her mother was—and still is—a conservator and her father worked as an art dealer. As a kid, Wyld says, she was anxious and worried. “I was about as introverted as you could be,” she says, “skin side out.”
Wyld graduated Bath Spa University in Bath in 2002 with a degree in creative arts. In 2004, she completed an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. In between, she worked for a couple of years as a librarian for a stroke association. “I think I did the creative writing course because I needed a reason to give up that job sending out pamphlets to people about their strokes,” she says. “You know... fascinating.”
Wyld had success as a writer from the very beginning of her career. While in grad school, she got an agent, who sold her 2009 debut, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, which follows the story of three men in Australia determined to escape their pasts. She followed that up with All the Birds, Singing (2013), about a woman who flees her dark history in Australia to live as a sheep farmer on a remote British island, and The Bass Rock (2020), set on the wild coast of Scotland and featuring intertwined stories of three women who, over centuries, confront male violence.
Wyld has a laundry list of prizes—including a John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and Betty Trask Award—but acknowledges that trophies only go so far. “It’s wonderful but it never gets rid of that monkey of self-doubt,” she says. “There’s always a moment when I’m writing a novel and thinking, Oh, this is not even a short story, this is not a novel, this is just me going on. I think that’s just part of my process.”
That said, she credits the prizes with enabling her to keep writing. “There’s not a heap of cash in writing literary novels. I wouldn’t have been financially able to write without the prizes or have had the motivation to write had I not had some of those accolades, because so much is telling you not to do it. But, you know, I’m not keen to go back to work at the stroke association. So yes, it’s all wonderful.”
As The Echoes progresses, Max attempts to discover how he died and just what being a ghost entails while piecing together Hannah’s life. The relationship between her protagonists, Wyld says, is based on her marriage with her husband.
“I think in fiction we often whitewash relationships—he is terrible, she is terrible, or they can’t live without each other—but we know in life it’s more complicated than that,” she says. “You have times where you are saying, Who is this person and why am I here? Also there’s the wild secrets we keep from each other and from ourselves. I don’t think we ever know another person or even fully know ourselves. I find it endlessly fascinating that you start to resent the person you’re with and then you peel back a layer and there’s actually some good gooey stuff under there. I think secrets are inevitable, but I don’t find it a moral thing, just how do you move differently when there’s no eyes on you, the way you talk to yourself when you’re alone—those are secrets, and it’s okay to be like I’m this weird little gerbil living in this meat sack.”
The novel also grapples with Australia’s Stolen Generations, children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were taken from their families during the 19th and 20th centuries in keeping with government policy. Removed children were denied access to their culture, placed in institutions, or raised by non-Indigenous people. According to the Healing Foundation, as many as one-third of all Indigenous children were taken between 1910 and the 1970s. In 2008 the federal government of Australia issued a public apology for the policy.
In The Echoes, the school for removed Aboriginal children—which stood on land that Hannah’s uncle later purchased—was a place of brutal beatings, suicide, and unmarked graves. “They had to be broken in like horses,” the headmistress of the school tells her son.
“There’s violence in everything I’ve written,” Wyld says, “but I think the violence in The Echoes is more like stuff that trickles down. What I wanted to do with that story line in The Echoes was, while I don’t have the right to tell the First Nations story, I can talk about the awkwardness and the clumsiness with which white Australians approach it or don’t approach it. And the feeling of being a white Australian and knowing that your ancestors have done such appalling things is a big weight, and I’m sure that’s part of the reason that we’re so uncomfortable with it. It took a long time for anyone to say sorry. I worry that if that isn’t looked at then there’s no change possible.”
