Hard by a Great Forest -- Leo Vardiashvili, Hardcover

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... [Vardiashvili's] sprawling narrative, part comic, part tragic, abounds in mysteries, monsters, magic and terrors. 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.

Author: Leo Vardiashvili
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 01/30/2024
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.18lbs
Size: 9.28h x 6.36w x 1.05d
ISBN: 9780593545034

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/30/2023
Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2023
Booklist 11/01/2023 pg. 45
Library Journal 12/01/2023 pg. 89

About the Author
Leo Vardiashvili was born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia. When he was twelve, he and his family fled Georgia's post-Soviet regime for asylum in England. He studied English literature at Queen Mary University of London.