Bloomsbury Publishing is excited to offer 5 reading groups 10 advanced proof copies each of Hard by a Great Forest, the stand-out literary debut from an original new voice, as well as a delicious Georgian-themed book-club kit for the perfect book club evening!
About Hard by a Great Forest
‘This novel annihilated me. I gasped, laughed, and wept my way through it’ KHALED HOSSEINI
Tbilisi’s littered with memories that await me like landmines. The dearly departed voices I silenced long ago have come back without my permission. The situation calls for someone with a plan. I didn’t even bring toothpaste.
Saba is just a child when he flees his home in Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in the UK after Russia’s occupation of South Ossetia. 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 email they receive from him causes a mystery to unfold before them: ‘My boys, I did something I can’t undo. I need to get away from here before those people catch me. Maybe in the mountains I’ll be safe. 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.
How to get involved
To be in with a chance of winning 10 advanced proof copies of Hard by A Great Forest to read and review with your reading group please log in and complete the survey below by 27 November.
If successful, each of your members will be expected to share a review on Amazon, Goodreads, Waterstones or the Reading Groups for Everyone website within eight weeks of receiving the books. Please only pitch if you can commit to this.
