Book Review: The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

“The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once, if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens by inches, in a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.”

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey is set to be released on 18th February and follows Evelyn Caldwell who should be enjoying an evening in her honour, celebrating her award-winning scientific research. But Evelyn has things on her mind. Things like Nathan, her husband, who has left her for a younger, better woman. A woman who shouldn’t exist. A woman who is now pregnant, but shouldn’t be. A woman who is strikingly familiar. Too familiar to be a coincidence.

Rating:

Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton for a free advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Echo Wife is a dark thriller with a sci-fi twist. Superbly written and character-driven, Sarah Gailey brilliantly combines a dystopian-feeling futuristic setting with a compelling narrative that really gets inside your head.

Complex and well-thought-out, while the book is more science-fiction than a thriller, it reads like a typical thriller in that it’s easy to understand and follow. Although it leaves you constantly filled with suspense, it didn’t have me desperately flicking through to see how it would end. Instead, I savoured every word and detail.

Author Sarah Gailey told Goodreads that the primary inspiration for her book was the aftermath of her own divorce, and I could really feel that her story was personal. Her observations of how a marriage can come apart and how relationships can be so easily replaced are what I found most striking.

Gailey also commented that her divorce “was the first time in my life that I was learning to define myself not based on what anybody else needed from me”, and that’s what I connected to most of all. I found myself really relating to Evelyn as it’s easy to feel a loss of identity in both marriage and motherhood, so I thought that the concept was used perfectly to explore the theme of identity in an original and significant way.

Promoted to be perfect for fans of Big Little Lies and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror and I could definitely see this book working brilliantly on-screen.