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Product Info

Publisher: Penguin

Author: Leo Vardiashvili

ISBN: 9780593719671

Year: 2024

Format: Paperback

Historical fiction

Hard By A Great Forest by
Leo Vardiashvili

- +

$ 470.00 mxn

Hard By A Great Forest by

Leo Vardiashvili

Reviews

"Vardiashvili's heartbreaking debut novel lays bare the effects that displacement can have over generations and illuminates the resilience of those who have suffered and still found their way to happiness"

Washington Post

Summary

Amid rubble and rebuilding in a former Soviet land, one family must rescue one another and put the past to a stirring novel about what happens after the fighting is over

“My mother stayed, so that we could go.”

Having fled conflict in the former-Soviet Republic of Georgia as children, Saba and his brother have fought to make peace with the past. In particular, they struggle with the sacrifices of a mother who remained in a war zone so that their father could get them out. Now, years later, the brothers are young adults, their mother is dead, and their father has been lured back to their beautiful, decaying homeland – only to disappear. Then Saba’s older brother, chasing after their missing father, vanishes too.

Left alone to figure out what has happened and to find his family, Saba sets off on his own urgent, haunted search across his homeland. Accompanied by new friends and old ghosts as he follows a breadcrumb trail of clues, he must wrestle the present from the past as he crosses into the kind of danger zones – both physical and emotional – that he thought he had left behind. 

Harrowing and tender but leavened with humor and an appreciation for the absurd, Hard by a Great Forest offers a unique story about traumas of war felt even decades after the fighting, and the long-term effects on those families driven not just to survive, but to remember.

“To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

John Steinbeck

“I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see.”

Nan Shepard

“What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.”

Elena Ferrante

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

George Orwell

“How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.”

Kate Grenville