Beguiling … Vivid, nostalgia-tinged images are littered throughout Leo Vardiashvili’s moving debut … Vardiashvili mixes a breezy tone with glinting lyricism

A compelling novel about war, family separation and ambivalent homecoming, its tale of sacrifice, guilt and betrayal is propelled by dark mysteries and offset by glorious shafts of humour …Novels such as this might help light the way

A family story in an unfamiliar setting, the journey affords us glimpses of Georgian history, swearing, wine, eyebrows and mordant humour … An intriguing treasure hunt, self-consciously picaresque and peppered with references to magic, myths and miracles

The stakes could barely be higher in Leo Vardiashvili’s propulsive page-turner Hard by a Great Forest … Taking its title from a line in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Vardiashvili’s sprawling narrative, part comic, part tragic, abounds in mysteries, monsters, magic and terrors. It’s a spellbinding achievement

War trumps most things, Leo Vardiashvili observes early on in his poignant and often painfully comic novel about the effect of violence and conflict on those who must live through them

It is a testament to Vardiashvili’s writing that he converts the grief and yearning of the forcibly displaced into such a pacy and frequently funny novel … Vardiashvili’s hugely impressive debut might be about a place that many of us will not know well but its themes are representative of the wider story of our era … In this wise, moving and instructive book Vardiashvili, with extraordinary maturity and lightness of touch, cuts through the deafening white noise of sloganeering arguments to present the intimate lives of traumatised people doing their best

Beguiling … Vivid, nostalgia-tinged images are littered throughout Leo Vardiashvili’s moving debut … Vardiashvili mixes a breezy tone with glinting lyricism

A playful and sinister narrative about two siblings sent to the woods by their father… A treasure hunt through Georgian culture

A captivating star-burst of a novel … An all-consuming, deeply affecting story of family, memory, courage, perseverance, and brutality, leavened with a little magic and a touch of madness … I urge you to read it

Vardiashvili has captured the winking, world-weary humor and magic-realist touches that mark a lot of literature from Europe’s war-torn corners … Like the voices on the radio, people can keep speaking out their dreams of rescue. And the book persuades you that sometimes, a form of it might arrive

This powerful debut draws on the legacy of the war in Georgia in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union … A fairytale tone allows Vardiashvili to creep up on his theme of survivor’s guilt

Hard by a Great Forest has the offbeat lucidity of a waking dream … a novel that indeed resembles a walk through a dark forest, Vardiashvili’s imaginative powers render his timely subject matter at once strange, disorientating and – occasionally – even magical

A stupendous debut, by turns nerve-shredding, heart-rending and hilarious

Vardiashvili pushes the story on at pace as Saba searches for clues in the colourful enclaves of Georgia … This debut is a heartfelt, lively story

This debut novel captures both the long scars of collective trauma and the indomitable spirit of those determined to remember and survive

A sensitive exploration of grief, memory, loss and the immigrant experience woven seamlessly into a propulsive narrative

Rich with irony and animated with astonishing humanity, this tale of a young Georgian refugee’s odyssey into his birthplace to rescue family left my heart bruised and battered and aching for more

A wildly charming debut – propulsive, funny, and profound

Astonishingly crafted with history, candour, beauty, grief and just a little magic. A book like no other, from an imagination like no other. Vardiashvili has written a triumph

This novel blows open the heart of the past. It’s a mystery, it’s a picaresque, it’s a comedy, and it’s an authentic song of belonging and unbelonging … By turns political and philosophical, it introduces a fine new voice in contemporary fiction

Propulsive, profoundly moving and rich with humour and heartbreak, Hard by a Great Forest mesmerised me from the very first page. Inspired by Vardiashvili’s own family story, this novel will capture your heart

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

Hard By A Great Forest movingly evokes the complicated feelings of trying to recapture and redefine what home looks and feels like

Lushly haunted debut