RUNAWAYS FROM PARADISE is a creative retrospective of Georgia’s most recent past. An odyssey of three friends unfolds with heart-touching stories against the backdrop of a complex and contradictory epoch having a sad and sometimes tragic essence.

 

This book is an epos in preserving all the rules of the epic genre – a long and tense adventure, countless characters, and the dramatization of their stories considered with mathematical precision from the 1980s, the final days of the Soviet epoch, to the most recent events.

 

Ele Lezhava, the novel’s principal female character, loves three boys simultaneously – three childhood friends (Dzia Barada,  Dzesna Lale, and Now Look What I Should Do Temura), growing up before their eyes. The men are also head-over-heels for Ele Lezhava. The story of “a complex country” having gone through extremely difficult years due to a lack of knowledge about freedom and many other things as well, takes shape against the backdrop of these three friends, their strange love, and their circle of friends and acquaintances.

 

The most recent history of the Caucasus is expressed in Beka Kurkhuli’s novel with intensive and naturalistic passages, the grotesque, humor, and profound judgment through his own wistful, tragic people starting out with freedom.

 

RUNAWAYS FROM PARADISE was the winner of the literary SABA Award in the category “The Year’s Best Novel” in 2016.