Hired Man

A powerful novel about the indelible effects of war and the memories which stir beneath the silence of a quiet Croatian town, from Orange Prize-shortlisted and Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning author Aminatta Forna'Supremely masterful' INDEPENDENT'The Hired Man seals her reputation as arguably the best writer of fiction in this field' EVENING STANDARD'Terrific skill and insight' DAILY MAILGost is surrounded by mountains and fields of wild flowers. The summer sun burns. The Croatian winter brings freezing winds. Beyond the boundaries of the town an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life. One of the windows, glass darkened with dirt, today stands open, and the lively chatter of English voices carries across the fallow fields. Laura and her teenage children have arrived.A short distance away lies the hut of Duro Kolak, who lives alone with his two hunting dogs. As he helps Laura with repairs to the old house, they uncover a mosaic beneath the ruined plaster and, in the rising heat of summer, painstakingly restore it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars.

Unsettling and supremely masterful novel ... The depth of his character is revealed in every tic of his lonely, ritualised life, and his past is glimpsed in every freighted friendship and casual interaction he has with the men of the town. Through his brooding, bristling machismo, he becomes one of Hemingway’s men – epic in his small, everyman heroism. Every relationship is keenly realised ... The family is sharply observed ... What stands out in all of this is Forna’s near-perfect authorial control. She reveals her story at a pace of measured suspense until it reads like a slow-burn thriller. Her prose quietly grips us by the throat and then tightens its hold. It is storytelling at its most taut, and it leaves Forna less a gifted African voice, more a gifted writer, and one who has, with this book, magnificently realised her literary potential, Forna writes sensitively about the power of a history that is both terrible and banal ... Duro’s voice carries the narrative with a solidity and complexity that is very satisfying ... Knowing, and not daring to know; the difference between innocence and ignorance; the dangers of people entering situations that they do not understand: all of these are Forna’s themes, expressed with a deliberated coolness of tone. The best of this novel lies in its bleak insistence that the lives that have to be lived after the killing is over are almost beyond the comprehension of outsiders, A bravura performance ... If her second novel The Memory of Love, set in Africa, confirmed Forna’s flair for writing about war and its aftermath, The Hired Man seals her reputation as arguably the best writer of fiction in this field ... The intelligence of Forna’s storytelling is testament to a woman who ... has deep emotional resources ... A “method” writer who didn’t just research guns for this book, she learned how to shoot. The result is that scenes like the soldier’s comically brutal execution in the forest or Duro’s valediction to his dog are both masterclasses in descriptive writing. I found myself so eagerly consuming the story that I was missing the subtlety of her whispered prose and had to keep turning back to previous chapters. Forna is an author who demands much thought from her reader – not to mention Googling the fantastically complex Balkan Wars just to keep up. This is a novel to be passed on judiciously, like a special gift, a tale of two summers you may well want to read twice, Though she has transmuted the trauma into compelling art, the constant redrafting of childhood experience might be subject to what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a writer to whom Forna is frequently compared, has termed “the danger of a single story” ... She has a terrific ability to evoke the poisonous atmosphere of culpability and denial from which civil conflicts emerge ... Forna brilliantly portrays the atmosphere of festering tension in which perpetrators of the most grotesque acts of violence continue to live side by side ... She remains committed to a single story; though The Hired Man triumphantly proves that the story need not always remain the same, The dual present/past narrative has become a cliché in recent literary fiction – but it’s one that Aminatta Forna uses here with terrific skill and insight

Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow, raised in Sierra Leone and Britain and also spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of two novels, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. She has also written short stories and essays as well as for radio and television and presented arts magazine and documentary programmes, and was recently appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Aminatta Forna lives in London.@aminattafornahttp://www.aminattaforna.com/