Book Reviewed by:In Leo Vardiashvili's Hard by a Great Forest, young Saba and his brother and father flee their home in Tbilisi, Georgia, when the city erupts in violence. "We heard gunfire by night and saw brass twinkling on the pavement in the mornings, as though it had rained shell casings all over Tbilisi," Saba says. "[W]hen a stray tank shell breaks the barrier by your bedroom window, screams on, and deletes the corner grocery shop and the entire family living above it, you'll begin to make plans."
Strategically located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Georgia's capital city has suffered bloodshed and violence at the hands of invading armies throughout its history, from the Persians to the Ottomans to the Russians. In Vardiashvili's novel, however, the conflict that displaces Saba and his family is homegrown—the Georgian civil war that broke out in 1991, a few months after the country gained independence after seventy years of Soviet control.
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