Meet the Authors: Leo Vardiashvili in Conversation with Elizabeth O’Connor

Sunday 15th September 3-5pm at the Kenilworth Centre

Two very different but equally brilliant Debut Novels!  Join us to hear two quite different perspectives on their inspiration, the writing process and getting published!!  Find out what they’re working on now and what it’s like the second time around.

Secure your place by purchasing a £5 Book Token*

*Redeemable on the night!

Tickets available at www.kenilworthbooks.co.uk/meettheauthors

Kenilworth Books in Collaboration with Kenilworth Arts Festival.

If cost is a barrier, complimentary tickets are available. Please call us on 01926855784 or email info@kenilworthbooks.co.uk

Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili

(AN OBSERVER BEST NEW NOVELIST FOR 2024)

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’s father is missing, and the trail leads back to Tbilisi, Georgia. It’s been two decades since Irakli fled his war-torn homeland with two young sons, now grown men.

Two decades since he saw their mother, who stayed so they could escape. At long last, Tbilisi has lured him home. But when Irakli’s phone calls stop, a mystery begins…

Arriving in the city as escaped zoo animals prowl the streets, Saba picks up the trail of clues: strange graffiti, bewildering messages transmitted through the radio, pages from his father’s unpublished manuscript scattered like breadcrumbs. As the voices of those left behind pull at the edges of his world, Saba will discover that all roads lead back to the past, and to secrets swallowed up by the great forests of Georgia. In a winding pursuit through the magic and mystery of returning to a lost homeland, Hard by a Great Forest is a rare, searching tale of home, memory and sacrifice – of one family’s mission to rescue one another, and put the past to rest.

‘A spellbinding achievement’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Poignant and often painfully comic’ OBSERVER

‘I gasped, laughed, and wept my way through it’ KHALED HOSSEINI

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor

(AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT OF THE YEAR 2024)

It is 1938 and for Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself. The ominous appearance of a beached whale on the island’s shore, and rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves, have villagers steeling themselves for what’s to come. Empty houses remind them of the men taken by the Great War, and of the difficulty of building a life in the island’s harsh, salt-stung landscape.

When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been searching for. But, as she guides them across the island’s cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach. Elizabeth O’Connor’s beautiful, devastating debut Whale Fall tells a story of longing and betrayal set against the backdrop of a world on the edge of great tumult.

‘I didn’t want it to end’ – Maggie O’Farrell

‘Powerful . . . written with a calm, luminous precision’ – Colm Tóibín

‘The quiet cadences of Whale Fall contain a deep melody of loss held and let go. It is a gentle, tough story about profound change’ – Anne Enright

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