Synopsis

On a winter night on a remote road in Nebraska, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter's truck turns over in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, his only close relative, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman - who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister - is really an identical impostor.

Shattered by her brother’s refusal to recognise her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, famous for his case studies describing the infinitely bizarre worlds of brain disorder. Weber recognises Mark as a very unusual case of Capgras syndrome and is keen to investigate. But what he discovers in Mark begins to undermine even his own sense of self.

Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened on the night of his accident. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition.

Set against the spectacular spring migrations of American Sandhill cranes, The Echo Maker is a profound and riveting novel that explores how memory, instinct and relationships make us who we are.

What the critics say

Among his most stunning yet: profound and heartbreaking

- Financial Times

An eloquent style, a strongly localised setting and a wealth of arcane and intricately researched detail...the novel is full of character, in cast and locale, and it impressively manages to be both meditative and compelling

- Hugo Barnacle, Sunday Times

Richard Powers is the most intellectually stimulating novelist at work in the English language today...[he writes] luminous prose. Sentence after sentence has the razor-sharp quality of aphorism about the weird wired world we have made

- Sunday Telegraph

Powers's most accessible novel...a novel of unseemly richness and complexity, never dry or condescending, always weaving its way towards an unsettling emotional climax

- Guardian

Like those great, unwieldy monuments of 19th-century fiction, Powers's novels require several readings to uncover all their nuances... undoubtedly magnificent

- The Times

Editor's Comments

Winner of the National Book Award: a novel of startling originality from one of America's finest writers

Richard Powers is the author of nine novels, including Galatea 2.2 and The Gold Bug Variations, both of which were nominated for the US National Book Critics Circle Award, Operation Wandering Soul, which was nominated for the US National Book Award for Fiction, Plowing the Dark, Gain, and most recently, The Time of Our Singing, winner of the WH Smith Literary Award. He lives in Illinois.