Aminatta Forna

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome Fellow and Council member of the Royal Society of Literature AMINATTA FORNA for a reading of her novel, The Hired Man.

Gost is surrounded by mountains and fields of wild flowers in which nobody walks. The summer sun burns. The 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 Grace, Laura's daughter, painstakingly restores it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars.

"The precise extent of the ethnic cleansing carried out during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia may never be known; and to its credit, Forna's novel does not attempt an explanation or an argument for either side. But she has a terrific ability to evoke the poisonous atmosphere of culpability and denial from which civil conflicts emerge: 'Grudges are reckoned. Greed grows. People denounce their neighbours to the new authorities with an eye on their chest freezers and televisions.'...Forna brilliantly portrays the atmosphere of festering tension in which perpetrators of the most grotesque acts of violence continue to live side by side, the trauma of the recent past disregarded by an influx of moneyed incomers too ignorant to realise that the wildflower meadows remain untilled because of unexploded mines. The novel is a continuation of Forna's overriding theme; the gradual accretion of small, seemingly insignificant acts of betrayal that eventually find expression in full-scale horror. In that respect, she remains committed to a single story; though The Hired Man triumphantly proves that the story need not always remain the same." —The Guardian