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Title details for Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili - Wait list

Hard by a Great Forest

A Novel

by Leo Vardiashvili
Luke Thompson
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ONE OF NPR’s “BOOKS WE LOVE" 2024
NAMED ONE OF THE OBSERVER’S 10 BEST NEW NOVELISTS FOR 2024
"The stakes could barely be higher in Leo Vardiashvili’s propulsive page-turner…It’s a spellbinding achievement."—The Financial Times
“Has a commercial-fiction spring in its step.… Vardiashvili also has captured the winking, world-weary humor and magic-realist touches that mark a lot of literature from Europe’s war-torn corners.” —Los Angeles Times

"This novel annihilated me.... Left my heart bruised and battered and aching for more." —Khaled Hosseini, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Kite Runner
“Tender and raw and funny.” —Colum McCann, National Book Award winning author of Let the Great World Spin
"Propulsive, funny, and profound."—Elif Batuman, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The Idiot
“A book like no other, from an imagination like no other.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less Is Lost
Amid rubble and rebuilding in a former Soviet land, one family must rescue one another and put the past to rest: a stirring novel about what happens after the fighting is over

Saba is just a child when he flees the fighting in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in England. Two decades later, all three men are struggling to make peace with the past, haunted by the places and people they left behind.
When Irakli decides to return to Georgia, pulled back by memories of a lost wife and a decaying but still beautiful homeland, Saba and Sandro wait eagerly for news. But within weeks of his arrival, Irakli disappears, and the final message they receive from him causes a mystery to unfold before them: “I left a trail I can’t erase. Do not follow it.”
In a journey that will lead him to the very heart of a conflict that has marred generations and fractured his own family, Saba must retrace his father’s footsteps to discover what remains of their homeland and its people. By turns savage and tender, compassionate and harrowing, Hard by a Great Forest is a powerful and ultimately hopeful novel about the individual and collective trauma of war, and the indomitable spirit of a people determined not only to survive, but to remember those who did not.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 30, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593829066
      • File size: 299776 KB
      • Duration: 10:24:31

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 30, 2023
      In Vardiashvili’s spectacular debut, a refugee family reckons with their past. Irakli fled post-Soviet Georgia for London with his young sons Sandro and Saba, but was unable to afford passage for their mother, Eka. Years later, upon hearing Eka has died, Irakli guiltily returns to Georgia. Sandro follows, defying Irakli’s wishes, and contacts Saba to say he found Irakli’s trail at their old apartment. After that communication, Saba hears nothing further. Worried, he flies to Tblisi. Sandro has left graffitied clues for him on walls throughout the city, recalling their childhood scavenger hunts and supplementing Irakli’s own trail of breadcrumbs, which includes pages from his unpublished play. In the capital’s neglected and overgrown botanical garden, which now resembles a dark forest from the Brothers Grimm, Saba must contend with marauding wolves and a hungry tiger escaped from the zoo. As he struggles to stay one step ahead of a corrupt detective who’s tailing him in order to nab Irakli, Saba faces many physical dangers, betrayals, and losses. In the end, he makes some difficult renunciations that signal his deepening maturity. The tense plot ups the ante from one narrow escape to the next, and Vardiashvili layers his seamless blend of genres (police thriller, fairy tale quest, coming-of-age story) with lush depictions of Georgia’s landscape, culture, and resilient people. This will leave readers breathless.

    • Good Reading Magazine
      Devotees of Grimm’s fairytales will recognise the title of this book as the first line of ‘Hansel and Gretel’. In some ways an allegory of the Grimm fairytale, Hard by a Great Forest spins a dark tale of a lost son following a breadcrumb trail to unearth secrets of a family divided and torn apart by politics and history. That this is Vardiashvili’s debut novel is hard to believe. It’s breathtakingly well crafted. Set in the traumatic aftermath of war in post-Soviet Georgia, the story is inspired by the author’s own experience as a Georgian refugee who escaped to England. It charts the journey of an exile returning to his ravaged homeland to search for lost family. From the unforgiving perspective of an eyewitness, Vardiashvili depicts a pilgrim’s progress of horror, brutality, grief, tenderness and humour, brushed with the whimsy of magical realism.  Saba, a young boy, and his older brother, Sandro, flee the civil war in Georgia with their father Irakli, leaving Eka, their mother, behind, promising to send for her later. Twenty years later and haunted by memories of the wife who was never able to rejoin him, Irakli returns to their homeland and disappears. Sandro goes in search of him but also disappears. In a desperate mission to trace his family, Saba also goes back. He is immediately drawn into a hornet’s nest of intrigue when he attempts to follow a cryptic trail of symbols, messages and passages from a play his father wrote. Pursued by the police and besieged by voices of the dead, he determines, no matter the dangers, to piece together the shattered pieces of his family. While much of the book deals with suffering and the anguish of families ripped apart, the overriding message is one of hope, humanity and one man’s indomitable drive to prevail against the devastation of war.  Reviewed by Anne Green   ABOUT THE AUTHOR Leo Vardiashvili came to London with his family as a refugee from Georgia when he was 12 years old. He studied English Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Hard by a Great Forest is his first novel. Follow Leo Vardiashvili on X

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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