The Echo Maker
Winner of the 2006 National Book Award, The Echo Maker is Richard Powers's eighth novel and a meditation on consciousness, identity, and ecology set along the Platte River in Nebraska. After a one car rollover on an icy road, twenty seven year old Mark Schluter wakes from a coma with Capgras syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that leaves him convinced that his devoted sister Karin, his dog, and his hometown are all elaborate replicas. Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, but Weber's own work and certainties begin to unravel as he tries to understand her brother's case. Around them, hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes complete an annual migration over a river increasingly stressed by drought, development, and climate change. Powers braids neuroscience, mystery, and environmental writing into a novel that asks how any self holds together at all.
What you might want to know about The Echo Maker
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Richard Powers's National Book Award winning novel about a Nebraska man who wakes from a crash convinced his sister is an imposter.
Yes, it is a documented neurological disorder in which patients believe loved ones have been replaced by imposters.
It shares Powers's interest in science and the environment but is smaller in scope and more focused on a single family.
The Echo Maker was written by Richard Powers.
The Echo Maker is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
