Saba, the narrator of the novel Hard By A Great Forest, fled the devastation of the Georgian Civil War (1991-1993) to England with his family. A key member, however, had been left behind—their mother. After his father had tried and failed numerous time to extricate her from the country, they learn that she has died. This heartbreaking news drives his father to the point of madness, and he later leaves his adult sons to return home, only to disappear soon after his arrival. This leads Saba’s older brother to travel back to Georgia to try and find him. When he too vanishes, Saba feels compelled in 2014 to go in search of both of them. This takes the reader to a country still dealing with the traumas of war following the Russo-Georgia War of 2008.

It is the country of Georgia that then becomes one of the book’s primary characters. From the point where Saba lands in Tbilisi, the capital, he is reintroduced to his past childhood and a culture that is both familiar and strange to him. After his arrival, he is befriended by Nodar, a taxi driver who becomes a key figure in his quest to find his brother and father. One reason for this is that Saba’s father has disappeared into a breakaway region to the north that is under Russian control. There, Nodar’s daughter might too be held captive behind contested lines.

While the story relies heavily on coincidence and unlikelihoods to piece together Saba and Nodar’s quest as they head into the breakaway region, the unfolding events keep the reader on the edge of their seat. Throughout his time in Georgia, Saba is guided by voices of dead family members who provide conflicting advice. These voices allow the author to introduce past events from his childhood. Leo Vandiashvili’s own family fled Georgia when he was twelve years old and his knowledge is put to good use in this book. Published in 2024, Hard By A Great Forest presents a compelling search that is compassionate and thoroughly engaging. What makes it truly special is the description of Georgia’s culture and history and the resiliency of a people coping with the consequences and anguish that continuing war brings. ( )

Excellent personal memoir with the absurd thrown in ( )

After Li Lan’s mother dies, Li Lan lives with her opioid addicted father and her amah in their respectable but crumbling family house. Unfortunately, Li Lan’s father has not kept up with society and so has no prospective grooms for his daughter to marry as she comes of age. Although she was informally engaged as a child, it seems to have fallen apart. Her father is pleased then to receive an offer of marriage from the same family – but the twist is that she would be the bride of their dead son, Lian Ching. She would live secluded in his family home, be well taken care of, but have no prospects for children or position.

Li Lan rejects this offer, but finds her ghost suitor Lian Ching inserting himself into her dreams and her everyday life and becoming angrier by the day.

She sickens and her body is separated from her spirit. Now her spirit is in real trouble as Lian Ching pursues her in the ghostly realm with his frightening and powerful spirit friends as she undertakes a journey to find her way home especially to Tian Bai, the boy she was originally engaged to as a child and now the head of her ghost suitor’s family. During her wanderings she also searches for her dead mother, as well as meeting the helpful but seemingly powerful Er Lang.

The author is of Chinese descent but was born and lived in Malaysia until age twelve. In her multiple endnotes about the book, Choo describes the afterlife mythology as a combination of Chinese and Malay which she notes is common to the area. She made this comment which I felt was my favorite from the book: “It seemed to me that in this confluence of cultures, we had acquired one another’s superstitions without necessarily any of their comforts.”

I enjoyed the book, but the plot was often secondary to the exploration of the afterlife. Nevertheless, I persisted and felt the ending redeemed the story. This was the author’s first book – I would definitely read another.

Saba moves back to Georgia in 2010, which is around the time I moved to Georgia. If a book is set in a certain place, especially a place I know well, I want it to be accurate. I got a feeling that it's written for foreign audience who don't know much about Georgia.

The true parts of the book were abused and twisted to make the book more dramatic and symbolic. Crazy things were happening in the book that I couldn't believe in. But it was also not crazy enough to make it a farce or a fairy-tale. There was too much graphic description of violence, killing and death against both humans and animals. The abundant usage of swear words wasn't always warranted. It was a weird mix of memories, nightmares, ghost voices, fairy-tales, a play etc. but the mystery part with the bread crumb trail, grafittis and secret language fell short of my expectations.

And, finally, it gave off a weird pro-Russian sentiment. How is it possible that Saba didn't meet a single Russian troop in South Ossetia and was shot at and captured by Georgians instead? ( )

Through the narrator, Vardiashvili tells a tale about the value of family and one’s homeland. After spending much of his life with his father and brother in London, Saba, the protagonist, leaves on a journey to find his father and brother, who had gone back to their homeland, Georgia. He soon finds out that Irakli, his father, and Sandro, his brother, have ceased to contact him because they are wanted by the police in Tbilisi, the capital of this worn-torn country.

The cab driver that Saba meets at the airport, Nodar, becomes his companion and friend throughout the book since he agrees to drive him to various places to search for relatives. There are lots of physical and emotional roadblocks. Animals escaping from a zoo was one of the first issues Saba experienced, and the animals’ trauma and discomfort are echoed in Saba’s desire to survive and the disruptions in his internal and external searches.

Saba’s passport is seized at the airport, and numerous events upon his arrival in Georgia foreshadow the dangers he will face. It becomes apparent that Sandro, Saba’s brother, has left graffiti clues for him throughout the disorderly and lawless country. So, he begins a scavenger hunt seemingly set up by his brother to help him locate his family members. Additionally, his father has left pages of a play to decipher. He is haunted by the people he knew as a child in the Soviet-occupied country and then during the Civil War.

The ghosts of his past acquaintances are guides to Saba’s search. The voices he hears provide insight into the Saba’s secrets and inner turmoil. Some of the attributes of the people gnawing at his soul are exaggerated in Saba’s mind, and some characters are not exactly what he imagines them to be. So, the author forces the reader to consider what memories tell us and how perceptions sometimes distort reality.

There are also multiple allusions to commonly known stories such as Noah’s Ark, Hansel and Gretel, and The Wizard of Oz. There’s also The Jungle Book, Romeo and Juliet, and so many more, and it almost became trite. The author also overuses commonly recognized expressions to move the story along
It’s too bad because I think Saba’s story of painful sensory memories and his desire to be reunited with his family members was a good story. It did not need the embellishment of so many seemingly learned and erudite references.

Vardiashvili explores many vital themes through Saba’s journey. In addition to devastation, grief, hope, friendship, and family, there are many references to motherhood and the deep voids in the spirit of a human being who has been separated from a mother. The detachment from mother and motherland is poignant in Saba’s struggles, thoughts, memories, and secrets. ( )

I wonder how many people who have left a country because of war, or for other reasons, have a lingering fear of what they were escaping and how long that might go on for. This feeling must be magnified if one person stays behind on the promise that money will be sent to get them out and that doesn't happen. The guilt on one side and the sense of betrayal on the other must be enormous and there will be people who return to try to resolve the issue. Hard by A Great Forest is a story that covers this ground with a father and his two sons leaving Georgia, like the author, and settling in Britain, trying to raise the money to get their mother out who stayed behind to allow them to go.

Eventually, Irakli the father, goes back to Georgia and then disappears meaning that the eldest son, Sandro follows him and then all communications with him stop. It then follows that Saba, the youngest son who is now in his late 20s, also goes out to find his father and brother. It is a true quest with many obstacles that have to be overcome such as finding the trail to follow to lead Saba to his brother and father, understanding the clues when he finds them, avoiding the local police, avoiding the zoo animals that have escaped during a large flood and avoiding being shot. Like all good quests, there are wise people that guide Saba on his journey: first there is Nodar who picks him up at the airport and offers his house as a place to stay and then his car and time to ferry Saba around Tbisili and then the country and over the border into Ossetia. There are also people he meets along the way and his dead family whose voices he hears and who offer him timely advice when decisions need to be made.

The clues for the trail that Sandro leaves are ones that only a brother could understand, born of time spent together, films watched and books read. The title of the book comes from the start of Hansel and Gretel and this is woven throughout the story as Saba follows a trail of crumbs into a large forest both literal and metaphorical. He does, however, come out the other side of the forest and decides to stay in the country and be useful - something, I imagine a lot of people who flee must have a dream of doing. In letting go of the chase for his father, Saba was able to let go of the voices of the dead, his old life and find a new purpose. That must be the dream of so many displaced people.

The escaped zoo animals bring a surreal element to the story. They might represented danger or the hunted, hid in dark places like forests and large parks and had to be faced. Saba did so on his own but there were plenty of police running around with tranquilizing guns, shooting the animals, getting it wrong and killing them and so I suppose they could also represent the people with the police as a state institutions that kept a repressed nation in its place. How dare the people escape in favour of something that isn't Russian communism.

There are plenty of Saba's dreams in the story that are the voices of the dead along with a play written by Irakli where Irakli becomes the central character, Valiko, on the run from his family both in the UK and back in Georgia.

The more I think about this book, the more I realise it is a Hansel and Gretel rewriting. In the fairy tale the mother dies and although there is a step-mother, the children have to rely upon each other for survival. This is the case in the book where the mother is left in Georgia, and does eventually die there, with the boys fending for themselves and all throughout the book Saba talking to Sandro in his head saying, 'See, I can do things on my own, including following the trail you left for me.'. There is no wicked step-mother in Hard by a Great Forest but there is a father who is unable to look after his sons because of his guilt. Like Hansel, Sandro leaves a trail for Saba but also like Hansel, is eventually unable to protect Saba who must stand on his own two feet. The power shifts in Grimm's tale from Hansel to Gretel and so it does in the book, with Saba coming out of the story with the knowledge that he can survive anything, and has, including abandonment and loss of love. ( )

Members of a family leave the turmoil in the Republic of Georgia and emigrate to England. After the father and one son return, the other son, Saba, returns to find them. He follows clues left by his brother. Saba is accompanied by the taxi driver, Nodar. He lives at Nodar and wife's home for a while. The story keeps repeating the motif of the Hansel and Gretel story with its trail of breadcrumbs, and it is brought out, by having Saba and Nodar follow the clues. The title is supposedly the beginning of the fairy tale. Oftentimes, dead relatives' ghosts[?] speak to Saba and guide him.
Enjoyable and about a culture and recent history about which I knew very little. ( )