‘Here’s what I think: there are neither major nor minor tragedies’, writes the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic. ‘Tragedies exist. Some can be described. There are others for which every heart is too small.’

Beginning with these words as an epigraph, Gretchen Shirm’s third novel, Out of the Woods, seems to ask just how far the heart can expand to comprehend the immense tragedy of others. What changes when we become, however indirectly, a witness to suffering? Much of the novel’s action takes place during the trial of Radislav Krstić (‘K’ in the novel) at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 2000. Yet the story belongs to Jess, an Australian woman in her fifties who, in an act of uncharacteristic boldness, has applied for a job as personal secretary to one of the judges.