Hard by a Great Forest

By: Leo Vardiashvili

Narrated by: Luke Thompson

Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

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up the trail of clues: strange graffiti, bewildering messages transmitted through the radio, pages from his father’s unpublished manuscript scattered like breadcrumbs.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.

©2024 Leo Vardiashvili (P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

'Astonishingly crafted with history, candour, beauty, grief and just a little magic. A book like no other, from an imagination like no other.' (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)

'This novel blows open the heart of the past. It's a mystery, it's a picaresque, it's a comedy, and it's an authentic song of belonging and unbelonging... By turns political and philosophical, it introduces a fine new voice in contemporary fiction.' (Colum McCann)

Wow wow wow

A book that transforms you into a different dimension. The story of those born in the city of gods that never lets of its grip, I could see and smell the city I knew as a child, The details of the civil war, the hardship of those that lived through the 90’s and of those that had to leave tbilisi, the shattered families, unbearable pain of powerless, like a cut that never heals covered in layers of scar tissue. I could not stop crying, laughing, reminiscing, memories rushing through my veins, bursting one by one, heart ripped by the pain that was suppressed for too long. In one word- incredible!!!
Thank you!