Out of the Woods

by Gretchen Shirm

In the year 2000, an Australian woman travels to The Hague to work as the secretary for an Australian judge. There, she sits through the trial of a former military man who has been charged with war crimes. As the trial proceeds, she is confronted with two conflicting impulses: being deeply affected by the testimony of witnesses, while at the same time plagued by an enduring doubt as to the defendant's guilt.

Meanwhile, she begins an unexpected romance and friendship, and these relationships help her to understand the stories of extraordinary survival she hears about during the trial. When she is called back to Australia to reckon with her own childhood, she finds she can't quite leave everything she's heard behind. Out of the Woods asks what it means to bear witness to the suffering of people who have experienced real tragedy and whether it is possible, afterwards, to resume a normal life.

Genres: Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2025

About the author

Gretchen Shirm is a writer and lawyer. She has been published in The Best Australian Stories, Etchings, Wet Ink, and Southerly. She was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists for her collection, Having Cried Wolf. Her new novel, Where the Light Falls (Allen & Unwin), follows a photographer's efforts to understand his former girlfriend's death.

Reviews

[Veronica ⭐️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Out of the Woods is the thought provoking novel by Gretchen Shirm based on the 1995 massacre of thousands of civilians in Srebrenica and the ensuing trial of a former military man charged with war crimes.

Whilst Shirm uses real witness statement extracts and the trial of a former General by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was a real trial the character of Jess is fictitious.

Out of the Woods focuses mainly on Jess and her mental health, having to listen to the statements day after day, her conflicting thoughts on the case and how hard it was for her to disassociate herself from the case.
Out of the Woods is thought provoking and topical. I was compelled to google the 1995 massacre to find out more information.
Full review at: https://theburgeoningbookshelf.blogsp...

[Theresa Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of the Woods is the latest release by Gretchen Shirm, an author who excels in crafting absorbing literary character driven novels. I particularly enjoyed her previous novel, The Crying Room, and equally appreciated this one.

Jess has taken a job in the Hague as a secretary to an Australian judge who is one of many presiding over the trial of a military commander at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Part of her duties is to sit in court and transcribe all testimony and evidence for the judge, who does not want to rely solely on the court provided translation. It is an emotionally charged job, and in Gretchen's expert hands, we are right there beside Jess, as she bears witness to the accountability of a genocide.

I remember the Bosnian war, the genocide, this trial. This isn't history for me but living memory. With the inclusion of extracts from the evidence record, there was the possibility that this novel would be too much, too horrific, too heavy. But it wasn't. The extracts included were enough to convey, and the balance between the trial and Jess's life allowed for the story to flow without becoming overly distressing. That's not to say that the atrocities were watered down either. I can't articulate this adequately, except to say that it was perfect. I felt, I contemplated, I cried, and I remembered.

This novel is primarily the story of Jess, her bearing witness to this trial, and how this subsequently shapes the narrative of the rest of her days. I love how Gretchen has this finite ability to convey the vulnerabilities of her characters with such relatable honesty.

We are currently living in a world gone mad, war being financed by wealthy countries, supported by nations who could instead sanction it. How will we bear witness in the future to these atrocities? Will the blame rest on the shoulders of one person? This is a deeply thought-provoking novel released at a time that couldn't be more appropriate.

Thanks to Transit Lounge for the review copy.

[Suzie B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning jacket and entices you to read it. Found myself wanting more of the court trial in it and a bet less of her life. Feels like a very rushed finish, but otherwise the pace was good.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jess travels to the Hague to work as the secretary for an Australian judge during the war crime trials of one particular military commander from the former Yugoslavia.
The story is told from Jess's perspective with excerpts from the trial at the end of each chapter.
I really struggled with this book. Jess seemed so naive for someone in her position. I struggled with the descriptions of her life, her concern that she couldn't buy her cottontail underwear, her joy that she could buy her moisturizer. Even when she befriends a victim and travels to the former Yugoslavia she seems totally oblivious of the victims, the situation she is in. And then suddenly she is forced, unexpectedly to return to Australia. I also did not think the excerpts from the trial fitted with the content of the chapters they accompanied, they felt strangely superfluous.
I think the author wanted the reader to think about baring witness but I was left with a dislike of Jess and did not feel she changed greatly as a result of these experiences. My opinion was not helped by the fact that I kept comparing this novel to Edna O'Brien's Little Red Chairs, a book which I felt packed a punch, while this was a very soft and somewhat inadequate consideration of a very difficult subject.

[Sophie Travers · Rating 3 out of 5]

The protagonist of this book is in her fifties but she is written as if in her 80’s. It is demeaning.

[Cass Moriarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Paul Wagenbreth · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I'd previously been inclined toward any sort of accommodation with a virulently pro-Serb woman of my acquaintance – positively rabid she was in her sentiments about the Bosnian War – I’m decidedly less so now after reading Gretchen Shirm’s “Out of the Woods,” with its revisiting of the horrors of the war, including an incident in the novel in which Serbs masquerading as U.N. troops herd men and boys into trucks that take them to their deaths.
Not finally the main thrust, though, the Srebrenica massacre, of Shirm’s novel, which with its focus on one woman and one not directly involved in the slaughter at that, is more on the order of John Knowles’ classic “A Separate Peace,” which found in a small school setting resonances of the larger evil of a world war.
Still, a reader going into Shirm’s novel could justifiably be given to think that the massacre element is primary, what with the protagonist taking a job as a judge’s assistant at a tribunal deciding the guilt or innocence of a prominent figure in the massacre identified only as K, whom, even with the abundance of evidence offered against him – “kill them all,” he is reported to have said – she finds sympathetic.
She just can’t believe he is the monster being described to the court as she takes in his ordinariness and look of gentleness and hears his vigorous denial of guilt.
It has her thinking, his denial of guilt, about how she herself had gone for years with a feeling of guilt even though she had done nothing wrong. Nothing more grievously wrong, anyway, than having once yelled at her child in a store, which still upset her enough that it sent her into therapy.
A small thing, nevertheless, she recognizes against the manifestly more horrific offenses being recounted to the court, but still an occasion, the store incident, for author Shirm to plumb the inclination toward bad behavior in all of us.
And while the notion of universal culpability in the annals of human evil is arguable enough – “we all have it coming,” as the Eastwood character says in “Unforgiven” – the sustained focus in Shirm’s novel on the decidedly more prosaic events of the protagonist’s life against the patently more consequential events of the tribunal did grow tedious for me.
Still, her novel is an able effort at trying to come to terms with the human disposition to denigrate or castigate “the other” in these nationalistic times of ours in which, especially distressing for me as an American, the once welcoming spirit that made the United States a beacon for refugees the world over has given way to a repellent intolerance toward foreigners fueled by a fiercely ethnocentric president and abetted in by a once-grand party now chiefly characterized by its fealty to its unapologetically xenophobic chief.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was looking for an escapist thriller to read in between other more serious books. A page turner with murders and excitement. What I got was so much better.

An Australian woman in about her 50s takes a job as personal assistant to an Australian Judge who is sitting on a case in the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague hearing a case from the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Her name is Jess. There are snippets from the evidence the Court hears but the book is mostly about Jess and her life as an outsider in a European city far away from home. She is living frugally and doesn’t know the language or anyone in The Hague but her life is strangely satisfying.

She is meticulous and careful about her clothes and her work and her dealings with people. This is why the Judge has sought her out to be his personal assistant. He can trust her to provide him with reliable notes. She dresses carefully and modestly and becomes anxious when the defendant in the case notices that she is sympathetic to his case. She worries that she may have been indiscreet in allowing her feelings to show. A doorman at the court attempts a hesitant relationship. On another occasion Jess visits the war crimes sites in Yugoslavia as she tries to fill in some of the background to the events she is hearing about in the court.

Then she is called back to Australia when her mother becomes sick and we see Jess in a different world. There are real problems between Jess and her mother who is now dying. I was reminded of the Lucy Barton books by Elizabeth Strout. And there are issues only lightly touched on about her former marriage and her relationship with her former husband. I was relieved these issues were only hinted at. It was enough to sense the deep undercurrents of Jess’s life.

In many ways this is an unusual book. The dark parts are muted and Jess has managed her life in a way that she can live with self respect and containment with her past in the background and the past coming out in the War Crimes Tribunal barely touching her.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poignant literary fiction tale, Out of The Woods by Gretchen Shirm is set against the backdrop of a United Nations International Criminal Tribunal hearing. Australian woman Jess moves to The Hague, employed as the secretary for a Judge, hearing the trial of K, in regard to potential war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. With its dreamlike narrative, Jess’s life unfolds as she attends court daily and reveals her mixed feelings in her dealings with K. Jess is also grieving her divorce and missing her son, as she enjoys an unexpected romance. This is a touching tale of one woman redefining herself in the face of tragedy, makes for a four stars read rating. As always, the opinions herein are totally my own, freely given and without any inducement.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

A good story, and a good way to tell history. I liked the personal aspect of it, whether it was the complexity of feelings and life and how two separate feelings could be true at once or whether it was what people had experienced. Although I found a lot of unnecessary repetition.

In terms of linking the personal to the overall story, it really made me work to identify how she felt she was cruel and hiding it was a link to how she felt about K, a person being trialled for war crimes. Or how what she felt for her son (which was again very repetitive) was trying to match to the stories of women having to watch their sons being taken away.

The ending was a bit average and didn’t seem to fit with the book.

[Lisa Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was intriguing to start. The real court transcripts added to the emotional impact however I feel that without them, the story would have been shallow. I think too that writing in the 3rd person distanced the reader further. The main character was, yes, traumatised by her childhood however was unlikeable as the protagonist . Her selfishness in asking someone who had been affected personally by the events to take her to the war area was grating. Disappointing as really wanted to give this 5 stars due to the research carried out by the author .

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

A confronting, introspective, sombre novel about the tribunal hearing into the 1995 genocidal killing of more than eight thousand Bosniak Muslim men and boys in around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War.

The novel’s main character Jess is deeply affected by the events she reports on in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. This United Nations court of law deals with war crimes that took place during the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s. Jess even visits Srebrenica to meet with and console some survivors.

When faced with the task of coming to terms with her complicated family relationships back in Australia, Jess draws on the lessons she has learned overseas about humanity and herself. No longer does she allow the guilt, pride and inflexibility that had previously characterised her interactions with her family to affect so completely her dealings with those she loves, her son in particular.

[Sue Gould · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 A beautifully paced exploration of the impact of being present, and recording The Hague trial of a former Serbian military commander accused of war crimes. As the story unfolds we find out more about Jess’s past and her relationships and the ways in which she has built her current life - deeply introspective, accommodating and centred on the perceived needs of others.

[Katrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very slow paced book especially after the tribunal at The Hague.

[Jesse Willems · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave up after well over 200 pages. Exactly 0 has happened, 0. Yes, the main character is somewhat moving, but by golly this has been boring.