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Winner - 2006 National Book Award for Fiction
On a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. When he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman--who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister--is really an identical impostor.

An imposter at the bedside

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Identity, consciousness and memory are the subjects of the compelling new work by esteemed novelist Richard Powers. In The Echo Maker, he has produced an intricately crafted tale that poses challenging questions about the extent to which we can ever fully grasp the reality of our own existence and that of the people who surround us.

When Mark Schluter flips his pickup truck on an isolated stretch of Nebraska highway, his sister Karin abandons her life and rushes to his bedside. The circumstances of the accident are puzzling, made even more so when she discovers a cryptic note about it in her brother's hospital room. But Karin is in for the most profound shock when Mark awakens from his coma firmly convinced an imposter has taken her place. He's diagnosed with Capgras syndrome, a form of misidentification delusion only rarely induced by head trauma. Karin's search for a cure leads her to Gerald Weber, a cognitive neurologist who's well known for popularizing his field in best-selling books containing accounts of bizarre neurological disorders. Unfortunately for Weber, the critics have savaged his latest work, making the doctor himself feel like an imposter, and as he gropes toward a solution for Mark's worsening delusions, he must wrestle with his own psychological demons.

Into this complex tale, Powers skillfully layers another plotline describing the fight to protect the migratory habitat of the sandhill cranes that stop on the Platte River on their way north each spring. In the battle waged by environmental activists and commercial developers over water rights, Karin finds herself caught between two men, adversaries in that confrontation, struggling to discern where her true loyalties lie.

Whether he's plumbing the depths of his characters' interior lives or describing the harsh Nebraska landscape, Powers' writing is rich and evocative, and thoughtful readers will find themselves pausing to savor many well-crafted sentences. In The Echo Maker he's applied his considerable gifts to chart a fascinating journey through the terrain of the human mind.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

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Publisher Comments

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman-who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister-is really an identical impostor. Shattered by her brother's refusal to recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, famous for his case histories describing the infinitely bizarre worlds of brain disorder. Weber recognizes Mark as a rare case of Capgras Syndrome, a doubling delusion, and eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition. Set against the Platte River's massive spring migrations-one of the greatest spectacles in nature-"The Echo Maker "is a gripping mystery that explores the improvised human self and the even more precarious brain that splits us from and joins us to the rest of creation.