In my drafts folder there languishes an email to The Spectator pitching a letter from a then-forthcoming trip to Georgia. That was, alas, the spring of 2020. So when I saw Leo Vardiashvili’s debut novel billed as ‘a winding pursuit through the magic and mystery of returning to a lost Caucasian homeland’, I leapt at the vicarious travel opportunity.
Fleeing the disintegrating post-Soviet republic in the early 1990s, Irakli Donauri and his sons (though not his wife) arrive in London – Tottenham, specifically – where they are surprised to find ‘no top hats, no smog and no afternoon tea’. The boys grow up; two decades pass; their mother never joins them. Then one day, overwhelmed by homesickness, Irakli returns to Georgia – and promptly disappears. He instructs his sons not to follow him, which they naturally ignore, and thus begins the youngest, Saba’s, heroic-type quest, feeling his way back into a partially remembered country ‘like a blind man walking into a knife factory’.
Wearing his lucky Pink Floyd T-shirt, and nourished by ‘breadcrumbs’ (the book’s title nods to ‘Hansel and Gretel’ of course) as well as restorative soup, Saba progresses from the manic streets of Tbilisi – wild animals at large, thanks to a flood at the zoo – to the northern mountain fastnesses, through a landscape of burnt-out churches, blood-red rivers and dark, deadly forests.
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