The Echo Maker

The Echo Maker is a novel by Richard Powers set on the plains of Nebraska, along the Platte River, where great flocks of sandhill cranes gather each spring. One winter night, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck on a lonely road and suffers a serious brain injury. His older sister, Karin, returns to their hometown to care for him, but when Mark wakes from his coma he insists that she is not really his sister, only a perfect impostor. Desperate, Karin reaches out to Gerald Weber, a famous neurologist and author whose books describe unusual cases of the brain, and Weber comes to study Mark's rare condition. Meanwhile Mark tries to piece together what happened on the night of the crash from a mysterious note left by an unknown witness. The novel explores memory, identity and the fragile sense of self. It won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction.