A biblical flood that saw escaped zoo animals wandering the streets of the Georgian capital Tbilisi furnishes the surreal backdrop of Leo Vardiashvili’s debut. A compelling novel about war, family separation and ambivalent homecoming, its tale of sacrifice, guilt and betrayal is propelled by dark mysteries and offset by glorious shafts of humour.
“Our mother stayed so we could escape,” narrator Saba confesses. Like thousands of Georgians, he fled the country during the civil wars that followed Soviet collapse in 1991 and a bleak winter that “left Tbilisi wall-to-wall fucked with no electricity, no gas, no water, and no food in the shops”. Saba shares his childhood fate with the author, who arrived in London with his family as a 12-year-old refugee in 1995. Writing in English, Vardiashvili joins novelists such as Nino Haratischwili – who wrote The Eighth Life (for Brilka) (2014) in German – in forging a diasporic literature, linked by common strands, in languages other than their ancestral Georgian.
