Hard by a Great Forest: : Leo Vardiashvili: Bloomsbury Publishing

Hard by a Great Forest

Description

'I gasped, laughed, and wept my way through it' KHALED HOSSEINI
'Tender and raw and funny, it's a rattling good read' COLUM McCANN
'A wildly charming debut – propulsive, funny, and profound' ELIF BATUMAN

Tbilisi's littered with memories that await me like landmines. The dearly departed voices I silenced long ago have come back without my permission. The situation calls for someone with a plan. I didn't even bring toothpaste.

Saba's father is missing, and the trail leads back to Tbilisi, Georgia.

It's been two decades since Irakli fled his war-torn homeland with two young sons, now grown men. Two decades since he saw their mother, who stayed so they could escape. At long last, Tbilisi has lured him home. But when Irakli's phone calls stop, a mystery begins...

Arriving in the city as escaped zoo animals prowl the streets, Saba picks up the trail of clues: strange graffiti, bewildering messages transmitted through the radio, pages from his father's unpublished manuscript scattered like breadcrumbs. As the voices of those left behind pull at the edges of his world, Saba will discover that all roads lead back to the past, and to secrets swallowed up by the great forests of Georgia.

In a winding pursuit through the magic and mystery of returning to a lost homeland, Hard by a Great Forest is a rare, searching tale of home, memory and sacrifice – of one family's mission to rescue one another, and put the past to rest.

Product details

Published	30 Jan 2024
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Extent	352
ISBN	9781526659828
Imprint	Bloomsbury Publishing
Dimensions	234 x 153 mm
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

It is a testament to Vardiashvili's writing that he converts the grief and yearning of the forcibly displaced into such a pacy and frequently funny novel ... Vardiashvili's hugely impressive debut might be about a place that many of us will not know well but its themes are representative of the wider story of our era ... In this wise, moving and instructive book Vardiashvili, with extraordinary maturity and lightness of touch, cuts through the deafening white noise of sloganeering arguments to present the intimate lives of traumatised people doing their best

New European
Hard by a Great Forest has the offbeat lucidity of a waking dream ... a novel that indeed resembles a walk through a dark forest, Vardiashvili's imaginative powers render his timely subject matter at once strange, disorientating and – occasionally – even magical

Daily Mail
This debut novel captures both the long scars of collective trauma and the indomitable spirit of those determined to remember and survive

Oprah Daily, Most Anticipated Books of 2024
A sensitive exploration of grief, memory, loss and the immigrant experience woven seamlessly into a propulsive narrative

Perspective magazine
Astonishingly crafted with history, candour, beauty, grief and just a little magic. A book like no other, from an imagination like no other. Vardiashvili has written a triumph

Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of LESS IS LOST
Rich with irony and animated with astonishing humanity, this tale of a young Georgian refugee's odyssey into his birthplace to rescue family left my heart bruised and battered and aching for more

Khaled Hosseini