Hard by a Great Forest

“A man without history is a tree without roots.”

I first learned about Georgia my freshman year in college while planning a conference. It immediately struck me as a remarkable country, straddling Europe and Asia, full of history and unique culture reflecting this inbetweeness. It is the birthplace of Joseph Stalin and of wine, pockmarked by scars of conflict. Until recently, I had never read a novel about Georgia. That changed with the incredible debut Hard by a Great Forest.

When a civil war erupts, Saba flees Georgia with his father and brother. Emigration comes at a steep price. The trio must leave behind their heart: mother and wife, Eka. As years pass and they try to make a new life in the United Kingdom, each holds out hope Eka has survived and awaits their happy reunification. But one day the boys’ father breaks down and abruptly returns to their motherland in search of Eka and quickly goes missing. Saba’s older brother soon follows and also disappears, leaving Saba with a perilous choice. Follow suit and return to the land he left as a boy or stay in an adopted country where he remains alienated…

Thus begins an odyssey of homecoming. Saba returns to a Georgia full of shadows, dark humor, and myths. As he tries to unravel the mystery of his family, he comes into his own. This is a beautifully tender and heartbreaking book about the importance of grappling with our pasts to fully inhabit the present.

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.