Hard by a great forest / Leo Vardiashvili.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York : Riverhead Books, 2024Description: 340 pages ; 24 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780593545034
- 0593545036
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Shelving location | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | Fiction | New | VARDIASH LEO | Checked out | 05/17/2024 | 33111011239775 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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.
"A devastating story of one family's border-crossing adventure to rescue one another and make peace with the past, set in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, two years after the occupation of South Ossetia by Russia in 2008"-- Provided by publisher.
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.