Hard by a Great Forest

Starred review from October 30, 2023
In Vardiashvili’s spectacular debut, a refugee family reckons with their past. Irakli fled post-Soviet Georgia for London with his young sons Sandro and Saba, but was unable to afford passage for their mother, Eka. Years later, upon hearing Eka has died, Irakli guiltily returns to Georgia. Sandro follows, defying Irakli’s wishes, and contacts Saba to say he found Irakli’s trail at their old apartment. After that communication, Saba hears nothing further. Worried, he flies to Tblisi. Sandro has left graffitied clues for him on walls throughout the city, recalling their childhood scavenger hunts and supplementing Irakli’s own trail of breadcrumbs, which includes pages from his unpublished play. In the capital’s neglected and overgrown botanical garden, which now resembles a dark forest from the Brothers Grimm, Saba must contend with marauding wolves and a hungry tiger escaped from the zoo. As he struggles to stay one step ahead of a corrupt detective who’s tailing him in order to nab Irakli, Saba faces many physical dangers, betrayals, and losses. In the end, he makes some difficult renunciations that signal his deepening maturity. The tense plot ups the ante from one narrow escape to the next, and Vardiashvili layers his seamless blend of genres (police thriller, fairy tale quest, coming-of-age story) with lush depictions of Georgia’s landscape, culture, and resilient people. This will leave readers breathless.

Starred review from November 1, 2023
Vardiashvili's Kafkaesque debut follows a Londoner's dark journey home to Georgia, his native country, to search for his missing father and brother. When Saba Sulidze-Donauri and his older brother, Sandro, came to London as children with their father, Irakli, in 1992, their mother had to stay behind in Georgia, where she died. Years later, Irakli returns to Georgia and two months later writes his sons, now young men, that he's gone to the mountains and they should not look for him. Sandro flies to Georgia anyway, emailing Saba that he's found a trail to Irakli. Then Sandro's emails stop, so Saba, an insurance salesman, also heads to Georgia. Vardiashvili, who left post-Soviet Georgia himself when he was 12, has infused his ambitious first novel with the traumatic energy of the refugee experience--Georgia's history as a country continually invaded and destroyed is never far from Saba's thoughts--as well as with an indefinably Eastern European sensibility combining melancholy, cynicism, and absurdist wit. Saba is obsessed with finding Sandro and Irakli but also obsessed with the past. Although he hires a guide, the intriguing taxi driver Nodar (who almost steals the novel), he also follows a host of voices from dead relatives and friends offering advice and grievances. As he continually eludes the shadowy police authorities tracking him, his pursuit becomes an increasingly desperate cat-and-mouse mystery. But Saba frames his hunt as a version of "Hansel and Gretel" in which he follows the trail of clue-crumbs his brother has dropped: hidden literary illusions, both playful and dark, in oblique graffiti messages and pages from a play Irakli once wrote. Saba finds himself in a world full of menace where the borders of the real and surreal blur, where wild animals that have escaped the zoo roam the countryside, and human killings occur as randomly as do moments of hope and humanity. An unforgettable aria to a lost homeland, full of anger, sorrow, and longing.

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Starred review from November 1, 2023
Vardiashvili's heartrending, beautifully crafted first novel follows Saba as he returns to Georgia for the first time since escaping as a child during the war that began after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wants to find his father and brother, who recently returned to Georgia and disappeared. Upon arrival in Tbilisi from London, Saba is picked up by Nodar, an Ossetian native who fled to Georgia to avoid his own conflict and who carts Saba around in his rickety Soviet-era car. Saba's older brother, Sandro, left a series of cryptic clues throughout the city, hoping to keep the police off their trail. While decrypting the messages, Saba also relives memories and speaks to the ghosts of those he left behind. Georgian history is simultaneously a tragic tale of constant conquest and an uplifting record of the resilience of community, and both aspects are expertly woven throughout as many characters talk of their harrowing experiences while emanating a kindness and warmth Saba can barely comprehend. Laced with humor and insights similar to those of Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Safran Foer, this is a sweeping, ambitious, and almost unbelievably assured debut. Exploring the long shadow of trauma cast by any war, Vardiashvili's novel pummels the reader with an emotional force that few can match.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from December 1, 2023

DEBUT Set in Georgia, the former Soviet republic, after the recent Russian occupation of South Ossetia, this part-picaresque, part-bildungsroman reinforces the theme "you can't go home again." Saba follows his brother Sandro to their former home in Tbilisi after Sandro goes searching for their father, Irakli. Saba follows the breadcrumbs his brother and his father left for him--a reference to the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale that inspired the novel's title. For years Irakli had worked tirelessly to bring his late wife to their new refuge in London. Now Irakli's guilt has driven him home to Georgia. As Saba searches, he is guided by voices of lost family and friends. Nodar, a chain-smoking taxi driver, also guides Saba on his harrowing and sometimes humorous journey to find his own voice amidst a war-torn countryside. VERDICT Vardiashvili's amazing and poignant tale of loss and resilience draws readers in with compelling descriptions of land and place. Saba encounters horrid acts of violence or their aftermath, but he also finds beauty, even magic and mystery. A remarkable debut certain to be longlisted for multiple awards, if not shortlisted for several.--Faye A. Chadwell

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