num_pages: 451
description: 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 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.
language: English
title: The Echo Maker
titlecomplete: The Echo Maker
characters: Bonnie Travis, Barbara Gillespie, Duane Cain, Mark Schluter, Sylvie Weber, Tommy Rupp, Karin Schluter, Gerald Weber, Daniel Riegel
genres: American, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Psychology, Mystery, The United States Of America, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 11084
places: Nebraska
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: National Book Award
category: Fiction
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux