In the earliest days of the pandemic, Kathryn Bromwich, the writer and editor for London’s Observer newspaper, found herself shivering indoors. She and her fiancé both had Covid—which, in both of their cases, turned into long Covid.
Bromwich, who grew up in Italy and Austria and now lives in East London, was an avid hiker, the sort of person who climbed mountains in the Alps or Andes on vacation. But during her drawn-out recovery, it seemed as if she might never return to the mountains except through meditation.
While meditating, Bromwich found herself revisiting not only images of peaks and forests but a specific character and story—which, in a months-long burst of writing, turned into her debut novel, At the Edge of the Woods.
In the age of media novels by people in media, it’s worth noting that At the Edge of the Woods is not only set far from the London literary world but is also very different from Bromwich’s own journalism. At The Observer, she interviews artists and commissions essays, often seeking to give contributors “an avenue to write about things that they might not necessarily get to elsewhere.” Her work demonstrates what she calls a “nice range”—she’s a journalistic generalist, she tells me on a video call, someone who “knows a little about a lot.”
But in At the Edge of the Woods, Bromwich goes deep, not wide. Set in the Italian Alps before World War II, the novel follows a protagonist, Laura, who has come to the mountains to hide from both a bad marriage and the stifling constraints of upper-class femininity, as she embarks on an intense voyage of connection to nature, and to her own body.
In the age of media novels by people in media, it’s worth noting that At the Edge of the Woods is set far from the London literary world.
Bromwich writes stylishly propulsive prose, creating irresistible momentum in a novel whose plot is tangled and exploratory. She reserves her greatest gifts for nature, describing the Alpine landscape with attention that begins as painterly—at the novel’s start, Laura hikes a mountain at sunrise and is astounded by “the peaks, the trees, the lake in the distance, the gossamer clouds billowing out in bruises of blue and pink, purple and gold”—and, gradually, grows hallucinatory, then magical. At the Edge of the Woods often reads like a fairy tale, though Bromwich leaves the question of whether her protagonist is “a mystic or just mad” up to the readers, she says, laughing.
For Laura’s neighbors, though, her potential relationship to the occult is no laughing matter. After a long stretch in the mountains and a bout of illness, Laura commits herself to living off the land, trading conversation and even reading for quiet communion with nature. In the town she’s moved to, this is deviant. From the moment she moves to the Alps, the men she encounters tacitly threaten her, warning repeatedly that her solitude is unsafe. Once she departs society completely, rumors that she’s a witch start to swirl.
By its end, At the Edge of the Woods is a portrait of both a profoundly liberated woman and a woman in danger. It is a knife-sharp, haunting novel, a testament in both its content and its origins to what both imagination and meditation can do.
At the Edge of the Woods, by Kathryn Bromwich, will be published on June 6
Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her debut novel, Short War, is forthcoming in 2024