The Echo Maker: Richard Powers

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With Weber’s assistance, the Schluter siblings attempt to unpick the intricacies of the past and uncover the truth about Mark's accident. But Mark suffered a brain injury in the accident and insists that his sister is not his sister but someone pretending to be his sister. Everything that happens is the most important thing that has ever happened and every character reacts that way. The novel delves into how memories shape our identities, and alternately, how the loss of memory can lead us to question our sense of self. The rest of it was good too, but the characters were never quite convincing enough for me to suspend my disbelief and actually care what happened to them.

The issue of subjectivity is a hotly debated topic in the fields of philosophy and the cognitive sciences. And now The Echo Maker examines the working of the human brain and seems to want us to realise that people are far more complex than we might be tempted to make them: science sometimes tries to reduce people to a set of rules, whereas Powers seems to think there is more to us than that. Nor does the book open in the anxious days after the attack, with the characters wandering the white, deserted streets and wondering, “How can I ever go back to my superficial preoccupations over high-thread-count sheets / that new S. To be honest, I am tempted to give all his books (well, nearly all) 5 stars, but there has to be a way to identify the ones you really, really love as opposed to the ones you just really love. Meanwhile, an anonymous note surfaces, suggesting that Mark's accident might not have been as random as it initially appeared.This book was long, boring, rambling and had one plot twist that was moderately interesting, but didn't show up until about page 400 (out of 450).

Still, be that as it may, I have now read them all and they form, in my opinion, a formidable body of work: I think he is now firmly established as my favourite author.What caused the accident, no one can say — the only witnesses are the sandhill cranes, half a million of them, who stop outside Kearney each year on their migratory journey.