A note from the author
It was past midnight when the pilot announced the descent to Tbilisi airport, where family I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years were waiting. Our first reunion wasn’t the joy you might imagine – conversation lapsed into uneasy silences, and no one would admit that time had made strangers of us.
This bittersweet feeling was the inception of Hard by a Great Forest.
The feeling would pass. In time, we would be family again. But that first night, on the drive to my uncle’s house, I tried and failed to hold back my tears.
My uncle shattered this maudlin spell almost immediately. He opened the door, looked me up and down, and with a flawless poker face said:
“What took you so long!?”
And I knew everything would be all right again…
-Leo Vardiashvili
Hard by a Great Forest
Leo Vardiashvili
Now in paperback
Now in paperback
ONE OF NPR’s “BOOKS WE LOVE" 2024
NAMED ONE OF THE OBSERVER’S 10 BEST NEW NOVELISTS FOR 202
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.
Now in Paperback
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Praise for Hard By a Great Forest
"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
“Tender and raw and funny.” —Colum McCann
"Propulsive, funny, and profound." —Elif Batuman
“A book like no other, from an imagination like no other.” —Andrew Sean Greer
