Hard by a Great Forest
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
