In the striking mountainous region of the Italian Alps, a woman exists with a quiet rigor, fleeing a past that she fears may catch up to her, and wandering ever further into the beckoning wood. Thus is the premise of Kathryn Bromwich’s At the Edge of the Woods, a debut novel from Two Dollar Radio. This quaint, pale-pink novel packs quite a punch, both in the essence of its atmosphere and its lyrical nature.
The story begins when Laura, a middle-aged, beautiful woman moves to a remote and off-grid cabin at the very edge of a woods. She is alone, she is an outcast, and she has secrets that she harbors from the villagers down the slope. Working day-to-day as a translator, Laura seems to find herself capable of only surface level relationships at best, forced acquaintanceships at worst, with the villagers who view Laura’s social pariah status as something to be steered clear of. As tensions begin to rise both internally and externally around Laura, she begins to lose her grip on reality, and the woods become far more menacing than they originally seemed.
One of the greatest strengths of this literary work is Bromwich’s utterly astounding command of language. Every nook and cranny of both Laura’s psyche and the looming woods themselves are explored in beautifully deep language. I found myself wanting to read sentences out loud because of the musicality that vibrated in them. On a vocabulary level, this is likely one of the most profound that I’ve seen in a long while.
Bromwich isn’t only using gorgeous linguistics to make her story sound good; she also uses them to evoke an eerie and haunting portrayal of the alpine setting of the Alps which is ultimately the core driver of the story. Laura is deep in this push and pull of feeling both at home and comforted by the woods as well as though something lingers just on its borders, something that she finds dangerous. The allure to Laura is that blurred line of whether the danger is real or imagined, past or present. Bromwich’s literary skill stands out stunningly in this work to say the least.
A little ways into the story, we watch as Laura is visited by someone in her past and we are launched into a flashback portion where we learn the reason behind Laura’s residence in a remote, unfamiliar village. I found Laura’s backstory to be both interesting and believable, and the visit from her friend brought stakes to the story that made the coming danger feel more prescient in the reading experience. There was, though, what felt like a bit of an imbalance for me in the structure. It felt as though Laura’s story made something of a triangle shape: building up to this meeting of her friend in her past life, all of which is deeply engaging, but the proceeding downward slope from the meeting loses a bit of steam. I kept finding myself looking over my metaphorical shoulder for this past ghost, but strangely it was like Laura was doing the exact opposite, like her friend’s visit didn’t affect her at all. I found myself confused at moments about why the first half of the novel set up her past as her primary internal conflict, only for it to kind of fall off the pages in the latter half. Thus sometimes that gorgeous, lyrical prose almost feels as though it’s droning on, because I kept waiting for this big, haunting thing to return only for it to remain out of the picture.
What I felt this story to be about, at its core, was desertion. There was a soldier who lived in the cabin in which Laura inhabits, rumored to be a deserter, just as Laura has deserted her past life for reasons known only to her and a small inner circle. And also how we view those who have chosen to desert something: with hesitation, scorn, judgment, maybe even violence, of the body or mind. Bromwich is exploring, poignantly and with care, how society chooses to view those who have fled something. Laura’s story brings into question how we move on, if we ever do, from the things that we’ve chosen to flee, and the consequences we may have to bear for the price of something like freedom. Genuine at its soul and ephemeral at its core, At the Edge of the Woods will lure and lull you into a place of mesmerization and haunting realities.
FICTION
At the Edge of the Woods
By Kathryn Bromwich
Two Dollar Radio
Published June 16th, 2026
