AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

In this haunting debut, a woman running from her past tries to find solitude and independence in the woods.

Laura Mantovani has spent several months living in a cabin in the mountains above an Italian village. There, she walks in the forest, reads, and tends to the small home she has fashioned for herself. Interactions with the locals are limited to brief errands and odd jobs, such as translations and tutoring, and though she is not accepted fully, she seems to command some level of respect from those she meets. This distance is threatened, however, when she takes a lover—a bartender who visits her at night and is eager to keep their relationship a secret. The secrecy suits Laura, who has secrets of her own she’d like to keep from the village; she’s hiding from an abusive and controlling husband. When a friend from her previous life appears at her door, Laura’s carefully constructed world begins to come apart. Wracked by illness and increasingly dependent on laudanum, she retreats into herself and the woods, unable to see the growing discontent the villagers have with the strange woman who appears increasingly unmoored. At under 200 pages, this tight novel doesn’t have much room for revelations to be overly drawn out, including a flashback to the days preceding Laura’s decision to run away from her marriage. Bromwich’s pacing works brilliantly; languid and slow as we meet Laura a few months into her time in the cabin, comfortable and familiar, before becoming increasingly disjointed and rapid to match her deteriorating mental state. Awkward interactions with locals give way to jarring and difficult exchanges in which Laura, from whose perspective the story is told, struggles to comprehend the growing animosity from even those with whom she was nominally friendly. The result is a slow-burning tension that never quite resolves into something like closure but is nonetheless riveting and original.

A gripping, richly layered story of a woman’s unraveling as she grapples with threats both past and present.