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.
