Speaker 1: There is a deep nostalgia for me.
Speaker 2: And my favorite thing to do is like go through
Speaker 2: the photo albums of just snapshots of you know, when
Speaker 2: we were kids, and they're all grainy, and you know,
Speaker 2: everyone's covered in zinc, and it just you can smell
Speaker 2: it and you can hear it.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you saw the American TV series Madmen,
Speaker 3: starring John Hammer as advertising creative Don Draper. It's often
Speaker 3: held up as one of the examples of peak TV drama.
Speaker 3: It was stylish and very addictive. Anyway, at the end
Speaker 3: of the first series, there's this scene where Don is
Speaker 3: pitching a campaign to executives at Kodak for their new
Speaker 3: slide projector, and he hinges the whole thing on the
Speaker 3: idea of nostalgia.
Speaker 1: Nostalgia. It's delicate but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek,
Speaker 1: nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It's
Speaker 1: a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.
Speaker 3: That relationship between nostalgic longing and old wounds is something
Speaker 3: that plays out across all four of Evie Wilde's novels.
Speaker 3: You may well have read Evie before her second novel,
Speaker 3: All the Birds Singing won the Miles Franklin and in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, her follow up, The Bass Rock was
Speaker 3: awarded the Stellar Prize. Her books are dark, often trauma informed,
Speaker 3: but she has this remarkable capacity to capture the tenderness
Speaker 3: of memory. I'm a big fan. She's also divided her
Speaker 3: life between Australia and the UK, growing up a bit
Speaker 3: in both, and that dislocation, a kind of permanent homesickness,
Speaker 3: has also underpinned much of her work, and once again,
Speaker 3: her latest book, The Echoes teases out that twinge more
Speaker 3: powerful than memory alone, exploring how we tell stories around
Speaker 3: and into the absences that define us. Michael Williams and
Speaker 3: this is read. This show about the books we love
Speaker 3: and the ghost stories behind them. In a sense, stories
Speaker 3: about intergenerational trauma and grief, novels about history, artistic representations
Speaker 3: of colonialism and dispossession are always ghost stories. They are
Speaker 3: a form of literature that's inevitably haunted by what has
Speaker 3: come before, a way that we might reckon with loss
Speaker 3: and silences, and all of that's true of what Evie
Speaker 3: Wylde is doing in The Echoes, But this book is
Speaker 3: a ghost story in a far more literal sense too.
Speaker 3: Max and Hannah's relationship, but the heart of the book
Speaker 3: is in many ways typical of a couple in their
Speaker 3: late thirties, debates around marriage and children, niggling doubts and anxieties,
Speaker 3: tension they can't talk about. But X is dead, he says,
Speaker 3: I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death,
Speaker 3: has become something of a problem. What follows is a
Speaker 3: novel not just about how difficult it is to ever
Speaker 3: truly know someone, but about what it means to try
Speaker 3: to hide from your past. And for Evie Wilde, thinking
Speaker 3: about her own past begins inevitably with thinking about Australia.
Speaker 2: When I was a kid, I was just like I
Speaker 2: am Australian, and I would affect a bad accent. But
Speaker 2: obviously you can tell from talking to me. I live
Speaker 2: in London. I was born in London. A lot of
Speaker 2: my bios seem to say was born in Australia but
Speaker 2: lives in London. And I think that's just because it's
Speaker 2: just easier for people to understand I am technically half Australian.
Speaker 2: My mum came over when she was twenty one. She
Speaker 2: lived in a pie shop in Paramatta, and she came
Speaker 2: over in quite an unusual way, went traveling. She's very
Speaker 2: working class, and she met my father, who was very
Speaker 2: very British and couldn't deal with Australia at all, got
Speaker 2: absolutely slated whenever he went over there, and very burnt
Speaker 2: and bitten, and so there was never any possibility really
Speaker 2: of us moving over there. And I think what I
Speaker 2: picked up on as a kid was, you know, apart
Speaker 2: from the beauty of Australia where my family subsequently moved to,
Speaker 2: which is a sugarcane farm in northern New South Wales,
Speaker 2: like the freedom of that place and.
Speaker 1: The smell and the birds and all of that stuff.
Speaker 2: That was something that I thought about constantly as a child,
Speaker 2: and I dreamt about it so much so that when
Speaker 2: I was there, I would be really panicked that I
Speaker 2: was just having a dream I was going to wake up.
Speaker 2: And I think that comes from my mum's homesickness, you know,
Speaker 2: really seeing her in a park in London, find a
Speaker 2: girl and just like scrunch up the leaves and really
Speaker 2: inhale it. And for me that you know, that kind
Speaker 2: of got passed on and you know, when she came
Speaker 2: over it was it was a thirty six hour flight
Speaker 2: and you know the idea of doing that more than
Speaker 2: once every two years, and the expense and all of
Speaker 2: that stuff, and also you know, she didn't have a landline.
Speaker 2: I think just being cut off from your family in
Speaker 2: such a way when you're so young, it kind of
Speaker 2: really built up this quite heavy homesickness that I kind
Speaker 2: of inherited. As for like, do I feel more or less,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I lived in Australia in my twenties
Speaker 2: in Sydney, and I think by that point I was
Speaker 2: kind of I mean, I was really feckless. I ended
Speaker 2: up living in a flat share with some people from
Speaker 2: Portsmouth in the UK because that was the only place
Speaker 2: I could find and it was on Bond Eye. It
Speaker 2: was all really just embarrassing. And I got a job
Speaker 2: working for the Red Cross, like going door to door
Speaker 2: in the suburbs and I got a dollar every time
Speaker 2: somebody bought something off.
Speaker 1: I was completely hopeless, and I'm sure.
Speaker 2: That added to my feeling of you know, maybe this
Speaker 2: isn't my home. But yeah, it just I didn't have
Speaker 2: any direction and I didn't feel the roots that I
Speaker 2: wanted to feel, and I think that is that's part
Speaker 2: of being from two places that when I'm here in London,
Speaker 2: I really I yearn for Australia.
Speaker 1: But it's the same the other way around.
Speaker 3: What's the relationship between that part of your identity and
Speaker 3: your imaginative creative self.
Speaker 2: I think, apart from my last book, The Best Rock,
Speaker 2: I think all of my books have started from a daydreaming,
Speaker 2: like a sort of nostalgia. It's easier for me to
Speaker 2: write about place I'm not in and to kind of
Speaker 2: in sort of April in London, think myself into December
Speaker 2: in New South Wales. I think that is like it's
Speaker 2: like a yearning and it's kind of the collection of
Speaker 2: all of those family stories that I was listening to
Speaker 2: when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: There is a deep nostalgia for me.
Speaker 2: And my favorite thing to do is like go through
Speaker 2: the photo albums of just snapshots of you know, when
Speaker 2: we were kids, and they're all grainy and everyone's covered
Speaker 2: in zinc, and it just you can smell it and
Speaker 2: you can hear it, like whenever I hear a butcher
Speaker 2: bird or a magpie, it's like instant transportation. Or the
Speaker 2: Pakistani mangoes are in season at the minute and just
Speaker 2: like I go down to our local shop and walk
Speaker 2: back just smelling one like a lunatic.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I love the fact identify that one of
Speaker 3: the kernels of your books is nostalgia as a starting point.
Speaker 3: How does the line go so swiftly from nostalgia to
Speaker 3: trauma just out of curiosity?
Speaker 2: I think everyone's got both in them. I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: a big horror fan. That's probably what's going on. I
Speaker 2: think every beautiful setting is vastly improved by a monster
Speaker 2: or a ghost. I think for English people in particular,
Speaker 2: Australia does hold like some of the last monsters, you know,
Speaker 2: like that, whether it's snakes or spiders or sharks. I
Speaker 2: think there's stuff that when you're in England, being English,
Speaker 2: you feel very very afraid of. And actually when you're
Speaker 2: in Australia you forget about it and you go swimming
Speaker 2: in the river and it's all fine.
Speaker 1: But well most of the time it's fine.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I think my family live on a river
Speaker 2: that has sharks in and it floods every now and then,
Speaker 2: and so that the house is up on stilts, and
Speaker 2: I think just the concept of sharks underneath your house
Speaker 2: is like such a beautiful, horrific thing, and I find
Speaker 2: there are so many of those things available in Australia.
Speaker 3: While intergenerational trauma and echoes of the past themes that
Speaker 3: run through all of your work, this is perhaps the
Speaker 3: one that most explicitly, most overtly ties some of those
Speaker 3: ideas to the colonial experience in Australia. And I'm curious
Speaker 3: about whether there was an anxiety about going down the
Speaker 3: barrel of that big, tricky conversation.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's a huge anxiety, and I think, you know,
Speaker 2: by this point in my career, I feel like when
Speaker 2: you're anxious about something, you kind of have to head
Speaker 2: towards it a bit. My main anxiety about it is
Speaker 2: I'm not articulate on it. But I think that was
Speaker 2: the point that I started from, and then I realized
Speaker 2: that one of the big problems is we're not articulate
Speaker 2: about it because words cannot express what happened and what
Speaker 2: the English have done. So like, there was definitely a
Speaker 2: stage in the writing of the Echoes where one of
Speaker 2: my editors was like really anxious about it, and she
Speaker 2: was like, oh, should we just take out all of
Speaker 2: the stuff about the Indigenous school for girls? And you know,
Speaker 2: should we just play it safe? And I felt like
Speaker 2: there was a real moment of like a part of me.
Speaker 1: Really wanted to do that.
Speaker 2: But I think it is really important to fumble your
Speaker 2: way through to some kind of acknowledgment of what went
Speaker 2: on and the you know, talking about inherited trauma, like
Speaker 2: certainly not the biggest trauma of what happened, but the
Speaker 2: experience of being a white Australian and having whatever your
Speaker 2: ancestors did in the past is you know, that's really
Speaker 2: really heavy, and I feel like it's important to scramble
Speaker 2: around and try and find words or images or something
Speaker 2: that express that feeling of just like horror.
Speaker 3: And it is you know, I think the best novels,
Speaker 3: the most powerful novels, grapple with that question about how
Speaker 3: to depict something that goes beyond what can be articulated.
Speaker 3: I mean, I remember the I think it was Nick
Speaker 3: Hornby's review of Saturday by Ian McEwen, where he went
Speaker 3: to town on that novel because he said, odd's a cop
Speaker 3: out from McEwen, because all the characters are poets and
Speaker 3: brain surgeons and expressly kind of engineered to be able
Speaker 3: to articulate their every thought and their every emotion, and
Speaker 3: a true novelist doesn't make that easy for their characters.
Speaker 3: They depict them without them having the power to articulate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a good point, and I don't
Speaker 2: find that there's much. I'm not that interested in people
Speaker 2: who have succeeded in life that well and what their
Speaker 2: idea is on the world, because it's not it's kind
Speaker 2: of in the cracks that the interesting people live. And
Speaker 2: I think it's really important that you don't finish the
Speaker 2: book with an answer, because obviously I don't have an answer,
Speaker 2: and I don't think there is an answer. I think
Speaker 2: it's just I don't know if you're allowed to swear
Speaker 2: on your podcast, but I think it's fucked you can
Speaker 2: be put out. I think it's about trying to kind
Speaker 2: of lock into that feeling that you get when that
Speaker 2: anxiety like you picked up on, that kind of feeling
Speaker 2: of like in your chest when the subject comes up,
Speaker 2: and trying to form it into some kind of shape.
Speaker 1: And that's never going to look pretty.
Speaker 2: And there were drafts where I had Uncle Tone be
Speaker 2: a lot more articulate about it, and they just didn't
Speaker 2: work because they weren't him, and it was, you know,
Speaker 2: Ian mckewning, I was trying to get my thoughts across.
Speaker 2: But I think what is more interesting and more pertinent
Speaker 2: is that people don't know what to say, and they're
Speaker 2: not It's all about looking away, really, isn't it. So
Speaker 2: we have a standard set of things we can say
Speaker 2: and we stick there, and I think any trying to
Speaker 2: kind of reach out into the darkness of what surrounds
Speaker 2: those safe words is really frightening, certainly for me anyway,
Speaker 2: And I'm always afraid of putting a foot in it,
Speaker 2: but I'm also really afraid of being silent. So ultimately
Speaker 2: I think the book is looking at who gets to
Speaker 2: tell stories. Well, I know that I would never, for example,
Speaker 2: tell a story from an Indigenous person's point of view,
Speaker 2: but it seems madness to me to not admit the
Speaker 2: white Australian experience of living on Indigenous land and.
Speaker 1: Choosing to look away or choosing to look in front
Speaker 1: with it.
Speaker 3: No, it absolutely does. And I'm glad you mentioned Uncle
Speaker 3: Tone because that seems to me. The significant thing about
Speaker 3: that character isn't whether he has the language to express
Speaker 3: this disquiet, these ideas, whatever, but he does have the
Speaker 3: tenacity the pugnaciousness, the drunkenness as well, to not have
Speaker 3: barriers to what he feels he can comment on. You know,
Speaker 3: as a character. He must be liberating as a writer
Speaker 3: because he is someone who is not inhibited in sounding up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was kind of important to me to give
Speaker 2: that kind of voice to someone who's also not what
Speaker 2: we would call a goody. I mean, I wrote him
Speaker 2: as somebody who I wanted you to be kind of
Speaker 2: charmed by him in a way and feel real grief
Speaker 2: at what he eventually does. And I was sort of
Speaker 2: thinking about with in the Me Too movement, the in
Speaker 2: particular comedians that were accused of correctly of doing terrible
Speaker 2: things and how their friends like stood up for them
Speaker 2: and then were shouted down, and that discomfort of there's
Speaker 2: someone you love and they've done a terrible thing. It
Speaker 2: doesn't mean you don't love them anymore, and that awkwardness.
Speaker 2: So I really wanted to give him the mic for
Speaker 2: talking about those things, because he's not some pious, right
Speaker 2: thinking person. He's just scrabbling around in the dirt with
Speaker 2: the rest of us.
Speaker 3: He does memorably say there's no unfucking it is there.
Speaker 3: Once you've fucked it up. There's no unfucking it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: do you believe that?
Speaker 2: I think there's trying to unfuck it, which is important.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't think that things that we have
Speaker 2: done are unfuckable.
Speaker 1: There you know, what would we do? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I just can't figure out what that would be. What's
Speaker 2: we've silenced a whole language and a whole I don't know.
Speaker 1: We just put a muffler over everything.
Speaker 3: I don't feel like British politics is robust enough for
Speaker 3: the colonial experiment to be rejected in all colonial Australians
Speaker 3: to return to Britain. I feel like that might we
Speaker 3: wouldn't be well received.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, we'd have to open up the Isle
Speaker 1: of Wight. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: When we return. Evie reveals the story behind her own
Speaker 3: haunted house and why writing from the perspective of a
Speaker 3: ghost can be a whole lot of fun. We'll be
Speaker 3: right back. You mentioned before that you wouldn't write from
Speaker 3: the perspective of an indigenous character, but the recognition of
Speaker 3: that history, the recognition of that schism in the Australian
Speaker 3: contemporary lived experience, is really important to you, and I'm
Speaker 3: curious about how you approach that how you approach as
Speaker 3: you said, so, I'm muchally The Echoes is about who
Speaker 3: gets to tell a story. Are there points where you
Speaker 3: found yourself at the limits of a story that you
Speaker 3: felt you should tell?
Speaker 2: Yes, definitely, I think I've walked the line, but I
Speaker 2: would be absolutely open to hearing where I haven't. I
Speaker 2: felt awkward talking about death of Indigenous people and I
Speaker 2: was like, but I can't leave that out because that
Speaker 2: is what we did. And I feel the landscape of
Speaker 2: Australia is so steeped in blood that it felt embarrassing
Speaker 2: to leave it out. But yeah, I think I'm absolutely
Speaker 2: sure that I have blundered into things unknowingly and I
Speaker 2: would be delighted to know what they are.
Speaker 3: It strikes me one of the things that raises the
Speaker 3: degree of difficulty for you in being sensitive to those
Speaker 3: questions about how to handle death and belief and spirituality
Speaker 3: and other cultures is The Echoes is a book that
Speaker 3: has fun with, for lack of a better way of
Speaker 3: putting it, questions of mortality in the afterlife, And then
Speaker 3: you know it's a ghost story at its heart. Do
Speaker 3: you believe in ghosts?
Speaker 1: I believe that people see ghosts. The Echoes.
Speaker 2: The London parts of the Echoes is set in a
Speaker 2: house that me and my husband fled because it was haunted.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, you know, I don't really
Speaker 2: believe in afterlife, so I believe it is. You know,
Speaker 2: we had a new baby. I believe babies are haunted.
Speaker 3: Deeply haunted. Absolutely little fleshy haunted houses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, But so like you know, we both experienced
Speaker 2: sort of some weird things happening, and all of them
Speaker 2: on their own totally explainable. You know, there was a
Speaker 2: swarm of bees in our bathroom. That's because there was
Speaker 2: a swarm of bees swarming and they found a hole
Speaker 2: and came into our bathroom. But because it was happening
Speaker 2: at the same time as I was not quite hallucinating,
Speaker 2: but I could see with my eyes that there was
Speaker 2: no woman there. But I could picture a woman in
Speaker 2: the doorway looking at me, and she looked like no
Speaker 2: one I've ever seen before. And it had such a
Speaker 2: feeling to it. And there were smells and there were noises,
Speaker 2: and you know, I don't I don't know. It's a
Speaker 2: funny thing to look at your partner and go, shall
Speaker 2: we go and live with my mother? Because of the
Speaker 2: ghost here and for them to go, yes, take the baby,
Speaker 2: let's go. And now we look back on it and
Speaker 2: we laugh about it. And I'm sure you know I
Speaker 2: was terrifi because I had a new baby, I was
Speaker 2: sleep deprived, I was you know, who knows what the
Speaker 2: sort of drugs I was on for the cesarean we're doing,
Speaker 2: and you know, we were both just having daily meltdowns
Speaker 2: and the noise of a crying baby is haunting itself.
Speaker 2: I come from like a background of like there's loads
Speaker 2: of ghost stories in my family, and you know, they're
Speaker 2: those really great ones that have no neat ending.
Speaker 1: They're just horrifying.
Speaker 2: They're just like opened a box there was an old
Speaker 2: man in there in which and then you know, and
Speaker 2: that's it.
Speaker 1: There's no closure.
Speaker 3: It's just like ugh, I mean, first the close the box,
Speaker 3: I forget put the lead back on that box and matching.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I think I believe that we are very strange
Speaker 2: creatures and that one of our coping mechanisms is is ghosts.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's really it was really interesting in
Speaker 2: writing the book, like have to kind of set down
Speaker 2: on paper what rules my ghost can have and what
Speaker 2: constitutes a gust When my father died, I would see
Speaker 2: him everywhere, you know, but it would be a real
Speaker 2: human being walking down the street, and I'd be walking
Speaker 2: behind them, and they would be walking just as my
Speaker 2: father did in his clothes, and I hadn't seen their face,
Speaker 2: but I was. I would follow them, and I'd be like,
Speaker 2: that's just him, And what's the difference between that and
Speaker 2: you know, somebody sitting on the end of your bed
Speaker 2: at night, or like, you know, having a dream about
Speaker 2: them where they say some stuff to you might be
Speaker 2: complete nonsense, might be something that you've been really worrying
Speaker 2: about that was unfinished. And that's kind of like that,
Speaker 2: you know, the unfinished business of ghosts. I feel like
Speaker 2: it's all so tangled up with who the living are.
Speaker 3: How much fun has it been as a writer to
Speaker 3: introduce an element that is sits beyond what we know
Speaker 3: or what we're believing. You just say, I'm going to
Speaker 3: say a new set of rules for the story I'm
Speaker 3: telling is that it doesn't have to adhere to the
Speaker 3: things that I know in the world or the kind
Speaker 3: of story I've told before. I get to wipe the
Speaker 3: slight clean and say, okay, in this world, in this
Speaker 3: world Max's did and Max is going to talk to us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was great fun. I had a lot more
Speaker 2: fun than you can see in the book. I think
Speaker 2: the only super weird thing he can do, apart from
Speaker 2: still being around and being dead, is his size changes
Speaker 2: depending on what he's feeling like. But I did have
Speaker 2: versions where, you know, he was part of like when
Speaker 2: you die, you sink into the brickwork of the house,
Speaker 2: you know, and then he could see all the other
Speaker 2: people who died there, and it just it became wild
Speaker 2: and mad and really difficult to find the story within.
Speaker 1: So in the end, the most interesting version of him.
Speaker 2: Turned out to be someone he just feels a bit impotent, like,
Speaker 2: you know, they hadn't finished what they were going to
Speaker 2: say and they can't say it, And seeing the parts
Speaker 2: of his girlfriend Hannah that he hadn't seen before. You
Speaker 2: know that she can sing, that she talks to herself
Speaker 2: who she is when she talks to herself when she's
Speaker 2: entirely alone, and he can't have any input in it.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's such a massive fun thing to write,
Speaker 2: and actually all of the other I had several weird
Speaker 2: monsters that were floating around at some point and I
Speaker 2: really enjoyed them, but they just weren't the story I
Speaker 2: was trying to tell.
Speaker 3: I love the recurring thread of you having father and
Speaker 3: they're producing something that's traumatizing fathers that I'm having a
Speaker 3: great time when I'm playing, and it comes from a
Speaker 3: place of joy and nostalgia, and it's like, that's just
Speaker 3: where the fun is.
Speaker 2: It is I do think it is. I think it's
Speaker 2: just it's exciting, isn't it. I think I'm not Death's
Speaker 2: biggest fan, but there is a part of me that's
Speaker 2: like to be on that cusp and just to go,
Speaker 2: I'm going to find out the thing that nobody knows
Speaker 2: is kind of amazing. You know.
Speaker 3: It comes back a bit to that idea of the
Speaker 3: inarticulate again, is in a relationship, there are things we
Speaker 3: can or don't say to one another. And by building
Speaker 3: a relationship, by describing a relationship to us through the
Speaker 3: lens of death, through the lens of it being over,
Speaker 3: gives you an opportunity to to stitch out the things
Speaker 3: that could never be said between them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's this really interesting thing that happens
Speaker 2: in long term relationships where you assume you know that
Speaker 2: person really well, and that knowing them is an important
Speaker 2: part of your relationship.
Speaker 1: It's like I know you and who you are, and
Speaker 1: you never do.
Speaker 2: And also there's that thing you know when you're breaking
Speaker 2: up with someone and the thing that you say is, oh,
Speaker 2: you changed, and it's like, well, yeah, every selling my
Speaker 2: body and I took on two decades worth of information
Speaker 2: and the world changed, and you know, we change constantly,
Speaker 2: and the idea of that being a bad thing. And
Speaker 2: I think within relationships, it's very easy to get a
Speaker 2: sort of pinpoint in a person and go, this is
Speaker 2: where I want you to stay, and that's my comfort zone,
Speaker 2: and when they move out of that, it becomes very
Speaker 2: uncomfortable and you miss the old version. It was very
Speaker 2: like having a kid, you know. I look back at
Speaker 2: photographs of my son, who's now nearly ten, and I
Speaker 2: don't recognize the little sort of cherubie person and it's
Speaker 2: a really strange feeling and you kind of grieve that.
Speaker 1: You grieve who they were.
Speaker 2: I think there's something like that that goes on in
Speaker 2: romantic relationships that you're just like you kind of hook
Speaker 2: onto them and you're like, oh, please don't change. This
Speaker 2: is perfect and then you both go off in different directions,
Speaker 2: and the inability to acknowledge that is I think really sad.
Speaker 3: So just before I let you go to clarify, are
Speaker 3: you willing to try your childhood Australian accent on us?
Speaker 3: Now before you leave, show us how bad it is?
Speaker 1: All right, let's think what would I say? There's a
Speaker 1: shark in the park?
Speaker 3: Strom strong choice?
Speaker 1: And you went straight back to the hallucinating.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's that's great, that's let's not bad. I've got
Speaker 3: a whole new interview of questions about why hallucinating is
Speaker 3: the word that gets you into your Australian self. But
Speaker 3: that makes sense. That was perfect. I can't I can't
Speaker 3: fault that. Thank you if you wild Thank you so
Speaker 3: much for your time.
Speaker 1: Oh it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 3: Evie Wilde's latest novel, The Echoes, is available at all
Speaker 3: Good bookstores. Now, before we go, instead of what I've
Speaker 3: been reading this week, our heads up that this week
Speaker 3: there's going to be a whole extra new read this
Speaker 3: episode two in one week madness, because tonight they're going
Speaker 3: to announce the winner of the twenty twenty four Miles
Speaker 3: Franklin Award. The shortlist is Hossein Asgari with Only Sound Remains,
Speaker 3: Jen Craig with wall Andre Dale's novel Anam Gregory Days,
Speaker 3: The Bell of the World Hospital by Sanya Rushti, and
Speaker 3: Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright. Five of the six shortlist days
Speaker 3: are from small independent publishers. Three of the six are
Speaker 3: from debut writers. The prize is sixty thousand dollars and
Speaker 3: it's an award that, despite its checkered history, still carries
Speaker 3: a significant amount of cultural clout. The new episode will
Speaker 3: drop tomorrow with me chatting with the winner, so keep
Speaker 3: an eye out wherever you get your podcasts. You can
Speaker 3: find all of these books and all of Eve Wilde's
Speaker 3: books at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this
Speaker 3: week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends, subscribe,
Speaker 3: rate and review us. It helps a lot read This
Speaker 3: is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing and
Speaker 3: original compositions by Zalton Fetcho. Thanks for listening, See you
Speaker 3: next week.