Safe Return Doubtful

Pleasantly strange. That would be summing up.
For the first fifty pages we know little more than that a woman lives alone in the wilds of the Italian Alps in a rundown hut. Bromwich’s writing has already entranced thought.
She hikes the surrounding mountains everyday, hiding from something. In the forest, in the part of her protagonist, Bromwich explores perceptions, basic sustenance, survival, and complete escape into the natural world, all done in the simple language.

There’s a degree of unreliability about the narration, though after a while the reader goes with the flow, there seems no point in doubting her.

There’s a pleasing degree of experimentation here also, not just in terms of the plot, but in her characters as well. There’s a backdrop of folklore, but any genre one might attach to it jumps into another pretty quickly.

Based on this excellent novel, Bromwich, a contributor to The Observer on ‘all aspects of culture’, is an author to watch. She may well have discovered what she does best.

And, what better than an ending that totally wrong-foots the reader.. it’s a wonderfully unhinged finale, the ultimate dagger into trials of womanhood, and the woman the narrator once was.