New Novel Blends Psychoanalytic Ideas And Slavic Folklore To Trace How Childhood Experience Shapes Adult Love, Parenting And Survival

(MENAFN- GetNews)

Waiheke Island, New Zealand - October 21, 2026 - Edge of Me, a new book by Monika Killeen, brings psychoanalytic ideas, family life, memory and Slavic folklore together in a story examining how childhood experiences continue to shape adult relationships, parenting and the struggle to remain connected to life. The novel follows psychotherapist Myrtle across the course of an ordinary day while moving through different periods of her past, her family relationships and encounters within her therapeutic work.

Narrating much of the story is Baba Yaga, a presence drawn from Slavic folklore who observes Myrtle's thoughts, memories, dreams and emotional conflicts. Through this unconventional perspective, the narrative explores what it calls the psychological“baseline,” the place where inherited disposition, early relationships, environment and unconscious experience meet.

Questions of trauma, grief, attachment, motherhood, marriage and mortality recur throughout the novel. The therapeutic material also considers how experiences from the past can become bound to present situations, influencing perception and emotional responses long after the original events have passed.

KEY FEATURES:

• The intertwining of psychotherapy, family life and remembered childhood experiences.

• Baba Yaga as an observing presence connecting Slavic folklore with psychological interiority.

• An examination of trauma, unconscious memory and the ways the past can remain active in the present.

• A portrayal of motherhood that includes attachment, exhaustion, separation, guilt and changing relationships with growing children.

• Reflections on love, grief, mortality and the tension between destructive impulses and the instinct to continue living.

Rather than presenting psychological survival as a simple progression, Edge of Me depicts it as an ongoing process of remembering, interpreting and making space between feeling and action. The epilogue brings the novel's central concerns together by returning to Myrtle's childhood and revealing the witch figure as an internal presence associated with intuition, survival and self-knowledge.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

MK was born in 1976 in former Czechoslovakia. Discontented with her world shaping in Orwell's 1984 vision, she left in 1995, eventually settling in London. She learned English as an au-pair and later qualified as a lawyer while a trainee in a city law firm. Her academic journey continued with Master Degrees with Merit in Classical History and later, in Social Sciences. A member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists, MK is a practising psychotherapist

Book Name: Edge of Me

Author Name: Monika Killeen

ISBN Number: 9781971610160

Waterstones link: Click Here

Barnes and Nobel Link: Click Here

Ebook Version: Click Here

Paperback Version: Click Here

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