In OUT OF THE WOODS (Transit Lounge 2025), author Gretchen Shirm presents a well-researched, shocking, thought-provoking literary novel that explores the atrocities of genocide from the intimate perspective of a woman working at a trial at the Hague.
Set in 2000, middle-aged Australian Jess takes up the opportunity of her lifetime – to work as secretary for an Australian judge at the Hague as he conducts a trial of a former military person accused of war crimes. The narrative is delivered in two alternating parts: the longer, chronological sections about Jess’ day-to-day life sitting in court witnessing the evidence, and compact extracts from witness statements. This juxtaposition of the hard facts of horror and genocide sits uncomfortably against the longer sections, in which we learn of Jess’ family of origin, her ex-husband, her only son, and her thoughts, questions and curiosities about the trial she witnesses.
Her perspective is an interiority clouded with regret, doubt, shame, conflict, prejudice and uncertainty. She is appalled to hear of the charges made against the defendant, K, and horrified of the crimes of which he is said to have either led, taken part in, or at the very least, not stood against. The evidence of witness after witness, mostly women whose husbands and sons were executed, or who have disappeared, their bodies never found, is heart-breaking.
But at the same time, she is unsettled to find that she is drawn to K in some indefinable way, as a human to whom she might be willing to give the benefit of the doubt. This bond is strengthened when her judge tasks her with delivering some correspondence to K in his cell beneath the courthouse. Although their interaction is brief, she finds it disconcerting to look into the eyes of someone accused of such terrible things, but to also see before her, in court every day, an ordinary man.
During this time, she strikes up a friendship with Merjem, one of the women who has lost someone (his leather boots still stand in her entryway, unworn for so long, but with Merjem unable to throw them away), and this further embeds her compassion for the people of Serbrenica, in Bosnia and Herzogovina, who have suffered unbearable loss that continues to reverberate today. She also begins a romance with Gus, a gentle man who works in the same building; a romance that is tentative and fragile.
The central theme of the book is tragedy, and whether after bearing witness to other people’s trauma on an enormous scale, we are ever able afterwards to really resume a normal life. Certainly the people caught up in the war, the victims and the survivors, are traumatised beyond comprehension. But Jess finds that even as her own knowledge and understanding of the extent of the genocide grows, she becomes more embroiled in her own circular and unanswerable questions about right and wrong, war, responsibility, culpability, guilt, extenuating circumstances, apology and restoration.
We remain in Jess’ head throughout the book and are witness to her ruminations, her slowly formed opinions, her too-swift judgements and her moral confusion about everything she hears. History is of course usually written by the victors, and yet in this case, Jess is uncertain if anyone counts as a victor. The history is equally confronting from every angle. She has most empathy though for the women – the mothers and sisters and daughters who still grieve, years after the war is over. She fears their grief is so consuming, so all-encompassing, that not only will they never recover, but she (and anyone else) who witnesses the retelling of the crimes is also tainted forever by the knowledge that the worst kind of suffering has taken place, and that anything she will experience or has experienced in her own life, pales in comparison. This knowledge changes her as a person; her internal balance shifts and becomes unsteady.
This is a beautifully told story about terrible things, but it is never graphic or gratuitous. War crimes and atrocities are hinted at rather than described in detail. Shirm cleverly mentions one line spoken by a child, or one last action by a parent before they are taken from their family, and this is enough to tell us everything about what we know from history books happens off the page. It is mostly about the interiority of Jess’ thoughts, and how she processes all that she hears, and in a small way, relates it to her own history.
Out of the Woods is a stunning literary novel, written in lyrical prose interspersed with true facts (or sections based very closely on true facts). It is the perfect novel for the reader who likes to be confronted with uncomfortable truths about our world, and the role of humanity’s inhumanity, and to be presented with alternate yet simultaneous stories that are divergent, yet also could both be authentic. This book will force you to think. And it will encourage a strong feeling of compassion that only comes from being in close contact with people who have endured a great deal of incomparable suffering.