The Hired Man - Softcover

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 (Independent)

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 (The Times)

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 (Evening Standard)

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 (Guardian)

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 (Daily Mail)

The Hired Man is an ingenious examination of the kind of ghosts that those with no experience of civil war are unable to see (Observer)

Subtle new novel ... There may be peace in the Balkans but the war, she suggests, continues: played out through memories that won't die in quiet, sleepless streets **** (Claire Allfree, Metro)

An intricate tapestry of betrayal, tragedy and loss ... Forna understands that it is only by making patterns out of chaos that humans find the courage to continue living. And in this affecting, passionate and intelligent novel about the redemptive power of love and storytelling, she shows how it is done (Daily Telegraph)

This richly accomplished and satisfying novel, which engages both mind and heart, has rightly made the Orange Prize shortlist (Independent)

Brilliant ... a remarkable novel (Guardian)