Lockdown was a strange experience for everyone. But it was strangest of all, perhaps, for authors – those people who already spend their days pacing floors, albeit ones carpeted by their own imaginations.

The writing, editing and publishing of books being a slow business, we’re still seeing the arrival of novels conceived in or influenced by that period of enforced isolation. Doubtless there’s a PhD student somewhere noting themes on a spreadsheet and drawing thesis conclusions from it all.

If so, the new novel from Anglo-Australian writer Evie Wyld may prove instructive. It’s called The Echoes and it’s the follow-up to Wyld’s 2020 novel The Bass Rock, which was set largely in North Berwick and partly against the backdrop of the East Lothian town’s infamous witch trials. The Bass Rock won Australia’s prestigious Stella Prize for literature and follows the lives of three women across three time periods. It was based in part on Wyld’s aunt, who lived in North Berwick.

The Echoes takes a similar approach. As it slowly unspools between London and Australia, between past and present, a series of dark family secrets are uncovered across three generations – the kind which are all too common and which have universal appeal for storytellers as a result.

The Bass Rock off the East Lothian coast. Picture: Jane BarlowThe Bass Rock off the East Lothian coast. Picture: Jane Barlow (Image: Jane Barlow)

“One of the things about being a novelist is you’re just incredibly nosy,” says Wyld when we talk over Zoom. “Even if secrets are incredibly damaging I want to know all of them, which is very different from my mother, for example. If there’s something that is going to be hurtful or harmful in some way, she’s just like: ‘I’m much happier not knowing it’. I want to know every single secret – before everyone dies and can’t tell me any more.”

At the novel’s heart is the relationship between young Australian ex-pat Hannah, and Max, her partner of six years. Both feature as first person narrators giving their (often differing) views on events. Adding to the high concept structure are regular third person flashbacks to Hannah’s troubled Australian childhood, and multiple chapters written from the point of view of the supporting characters. People such as Hannah’s wayward sister Rach, and equally wayward uncle, Tone.

Talking of dead people with secrets taken beyond the grave, Max is one of them. Not only that, his spirit is unable to leave the flat in which he once lived with Hannah.

“I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem,” he observes wryly in the novel’s opening line as he watches a teary Hannah fill the kettle, neck Night Nurse from the bottle, and dutifully burp the pickled cabbage of which her dead boyfriend was so proud. And how did Max die? He isn’t sure. One of the characteristics of the afterlife, apparently, is a certain haziness regarding the facts of your own demise. But it becomes clear to the reader in time.

“There were two things that came together,” says Wyld when I ask her where the idea for The Echoes came from and how and why lockdown featured so heavily in its genesis.

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“One is that it was the start of lockdown, which is why the novel begins narrated by Max, who is a very thinly veiled version of my husband and also dead, because I was so pissed off that moment. So it was about that feeling of being locked in somewhere together and not being able to leave. But also it came from me and my husband having lived in a flat that we left because it was haunted. That’s the flat in which the London parts of the story is set.”

The flat was in Tulse Hill in south London. One strange thing which happened in the flat involved bees. “There was a swarm, which is a natural thing,” she says. “But there just happened to be a swarm outside our bathroom, and then they all came into our bathroom. In a different flat, that’s just a swarm of bees. But in our flat, given all the other stuff that was happening, it felt like a symbol of something sinister.”

Other stuff like what? “My husband had an experience that he heard someone shushing the baby when the flat was empty, which is pretty spooky,” she says.

“I mostly had what I think are probably a kind of hallucination from being very, very tired and very, very stressed. But I would feel there was somebody standing in front of me. I could see with my eyes that I couldn’t see it, but the feeling was so uncanny and strange.”

So does she lean towards Team Believer, to put it in terms fans of radio hit Uncanny would understand? “I believe that people see them,” she says cautiously. “I experienced one, but I also had a newborn baby and hadn’t slept in a long time. A lot of things sort of came together.”

Ghosts may be new to Evie Wyld’s work (the title of her upcoming Edinburgh International Book Festival event is Hauntings) but two themes which are not are violence against women, whether physical or sexual, and the unfulfilled potential of women who put aside their talents and aspirations, or who allow them to be subsumed.

Wyld’s grandmother fell into the second category. “She was a really, really smart woman, and never really did all that much with her brain or nothing that satisfied her. She had some kids and sent them to boarding school, and then she became an alcoholic and a chain smoker, and that kept her occupied.”

Lockdown featured heavily in the new novel's genesisLockdown featured heavily in the new novel's genesis (Image: PA)

The character of Ruth in The Bass Rock is based on her, while in The Echoes it’s Hannah’s mother, Kerry, who chooses to sit out her own life.

As for violence, we talk just a few days before the National Police Chiefs Council declares misogyny and violence against women and girls to be a “national emergency”, and on the same day that the King’s Speech sets out UK government plans to make drink spiking a specific offence. That has particular resonance for Wyld as she has been a victim of spiking herself.

“Nothing bad happened to me with the spiking, apart from I was drugged,” she tells me.

“But what was amazing to me about was how when I started talking about it, how many close friends had had it happen and hadn’t spoken about it. And I think that really was the the power of #MeToo, just discovering so many people had had these same things [happen] and those things were not okay. So many women looking back at all the rapes and not having realized at the time that’s what they were. Or the abuses and the creepiness, and the stuff that you laughed off. I think I’m kind of quite numb about it all is the the truth of it.”

In real life, the past is always with you. In ghostly, lockdown-inspired novel The Echoes, it watches over your present and your future.

The Echoes is out now (Vintage, £18.99). Evie Wyld will appear at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 14 in conversation with Sinéad Gleeson