The Echo Maker

Bernadette Dunne delivers a complex performance, rich in subtlety and innuendo, in this winner of the 2006 National Book Award for fiction. Mark Schluter rolls his truck one winter night, off an absolutely straight road in Nebraska. Why? A cryptic note is found near his bed. Was there a witness to the accident? Dunne makes listeners ache as Mark attempts to recover after severe brain trauma. Mark thinks Karin, his sister, is an imposter, and Dunne makes Karin's confusion and frustration palpable. Dunne is as effective reflecting overwhelming strain as she is delivering images of endlessly flat landscapes or acres of noisy dancing cranes. Dunne reveals all of the sweetness and devastation in this beautifully written emotional puzzle of a novel. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 10, 2006
A truck jackknifes off an "arrow straight country road" near Kearney, Nebr., in Powers's ninth novel, becoming the catalyst for a painstakingly rendered minuet of self-reckoning. The accident puts the truck's 27-year-old driver, Mark Schluter, into a 14-day coma. When he emerges, he is stricken with Capgras syndrome: he's unable to match his visual and intellectual identifications with his emotional ones. He thinks his sister, Karin, isn't actually his sister—she's an imposter (the same goes for Mark's house). A shattered and worried Karin turns to Gerald Weber, an Oliver Sacks–like figure who writes bestsellers about neurological cases, but Gerald's inability to help Mark, and bad reviews of his latest book, cause him to wonder if he has become a "neurological opportunist." Then there are the mysteries of Mark's nurse's aide, Barbara Gillespie, who is secretive about her past and seems to be much more intelligent than she's willing to let on, and the meaning of a cryptic note left on Mark's nightstand the night he was hospitalized. MacArthur fellow Powers (Gold Bug Variations,
etc.) masterfully charts the shifting dynamics of Karin's and Mark's relationship, and his prose—powerful, but not overbearing—brings a sorrowful energy to every page.