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their childhood scavenger hunts and supplementing Irakli’s own trail of breadcrumbs, which includes pages from his unpublished play.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.