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Title details for Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili - Wait list

Hard by a Great Forest

by Leo Vardiashvili
Luke Thompson
Audiobook
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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.
Expand title description text
Publisher: Books on Tape Edition: Unabridged

OverDrive Listen audiobook

  • ISBN: 9780593829066
  • File size: 299776 KB
  • Release date: January 30, 2024
  • Duration: 10:24:31

MP3 audiobook

  • ISBN: 9780593829066
  • File size: 299822 KB
  • Release date: January 30, 2024
  • Duration: 10:31:25
  • Number of parts: 12
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Formats

OverDrive Listen audiobook
MP3 audiobook

subjects

Fiction Literature Historical Fiction

Languages

English

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.
Expand title description text
Fiction Literature Historical Fiction
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Funding for additional materials was made possible by a grant from the New Hampshire Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.