A stand-out literary debut from an original new voice, following the fortunes of three surviving family members returning from the UK to the former-Soviet republic of Georgia

* AN OBSERVER BEST NEW NOVELIST FOR 2024 " ‘A spellbinding achievement’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘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up the trail of clues: strange graffiti, bewildering messages transmitted through the radio, pages from his father’s unpublished manuscript scattered like breadcrumbs.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.

"The stakes could barely be higher in Leo Vardiashvili’s propulsive page-turner Hard by a Great Forest ... Taking its title from a line in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Vardiashvili’s sprawling narrative, part comic, part tragic, abounds in mysteries, monsters, magic and terrors. It’s a spellbinding achievement" - Financial Times

"War trumps most things, Leo Vardiashvili observes early on in his poignant and often painfully comic novel about the effect of violence and conflict on those who must live through them" - Observer, 10 Best New Novelists for 2024

"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