Behind the Book: HARD BY A GREAT FOREST by Leo Vardiashvili
What is your story about and where did you get the inspiration to write it from?
Hard by a Great Forest is about a young man called Saba. He returns to Tbilisi in Georgia for the first time in twenty years, since he fled the civil war as a child. He’s propelled through the story by a central mystery – he’s following the breadcrumb trail of strange clues left by his dad who went missing on his trip to Georgia.
The Georgia that Saba is dunked into, headfirst, is a fever dream of half-remembered places and people. Along this breadcrumb trail, Saba’s facing corrupt police who seem to be following him and strange graffiti addressed to him that leads him to more mysterious clues.
This breadcrumb trail takes him to all the places a tourist would never go – forgotten graveyards, abandoned botanical gardens, burned down churches, dark forests and frozen monasteries hidden in the Caucasus mountains.
If that wasn’t enough, the night Saba arrives, a flash flood sweeps through the city zoo and frees all the animals. So, in the background we have hippos, hyenas, foxes, bears and a tiger roaming the city with impunity.
Like in all proper adventure tales, Saba is in for a lot more than he bargained for. This is a story about family secrets, about belonging to a place and being separated from it by force, and what that costs on a personal level.
The story was inspired by my own return to Georgia after a lengthy absence. It was past midnight when the pilot announced the descent into Tbilisi airport, where family I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years were waiting. Our first conversations lapsed into uneasy silences, and no one would admit that time had made strangers of us.
This bittersweet feeling was the inception of Hard by a Great Forest.
How close was the experience of being published to what you expected? Were there any big surprises?
I was, and still am, completely blown away at the experience of being published that I’ve had. I still half-expect to wake up and find that none of it actually happened.
After bountiful rejection letters, I found my wonderful agent, Sara O’Keeffe. All credit goes to her from that point on – she took the novel by the scruff of the neck and got it into all the right hands.
Within three weeks, the novel had been pre-empted by Bloomsbury, Riverhead and Ullstein. Since then, it has been picked up by 14 publishers globally.
So, you can see why I don’t trust it all – I may just be about to wake up.
What was the most important piece of advice you received while collaborating with Cornerstones?
Cornerstones operate at a professional level otherwise only available to published writers with experienced, talented editors.
Quite simply, they gave me real, practical advice on getting my draft to submission quality. On top of that, they went above and beyond, and even helped me tighten up my query letter and submission pack (something, I hasten to add, I hadn’t paid for – it was simply Cornerstones helping a fledgling writer).
What stage in your writing career are you at now? Are you working on anything new?
As I write this, I am days away from publication of Hard by a Great Forest and firmly in the publicity trenches. Exciting times!
If you could go back and talk to yourself just before you started writing your first manuscript, what would you say to yourself?
Keep going. Even on days when you feel like a lone, crazy voice, working in a vacuum. Keep. Going.
And don’t take so long to invest in yourself and your writing. I wish I had got in touch with Cornerstones months before I actually did – it’s the best investment I’ve ever made.
