The Echo Maker is a novel by American author Richard Powers. The story revolves around a man named Mark Schluter, who develops a neurological condition after being in a bad car accident.
Set in Nebraska, the novel begins after Mark's accident. Mark is driving fast down the road one night in his pickup and flips his truck. He is rushed to the hospital and falls into a coma. His older sister, Karin, quits her job and travels back to their hometown, where he still lives, to care for him. Mark recovers from his head injury and wakes up but believes his sister to be an imposter. He is diagnosed with Capgras syndrome, a condition characterized by the belief that everyone in the sufferer's life is an identical duplicate pretending to be who they say they are. Mark struggles to come to grips with his illness and uncover the details of what actually happened on the road that night. In a parallel narrative thread, a renowned neurologist, Gerald Weber, comes out to examine Mark and learn more about him. Mark is cared for by a mysterious woman named Barbara. Mark suffers immensely from his paranoia and loneliness. Meanwhile, Karin reconnects with her ex-boyfriends, Daniel Riegel and Robert Karsh. Other plotlines include Daniel's efforts to save the habitat of the local Sandhill cranes and Weber's failed efforts to make Mark into a case study. Eventually, Mark discovers the truth of what happened that evening and he and Karin reconcile.
Published in 2006, the novel was well-received by both critics and readers. The book won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In a review for The New York Times, novelist Colson Whitehead wrote that with this novel "Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms."
