Duro is out hunting when he notices a newish car approaching the small Croatian village of Gost in the opening scene of Aminatta Forna's The Hired Man. An Englishwoman has come to live in the old deserted Pavic house, with her hostile teenage son and homely younger daughter. Duro is hired to clean the gutters, patch the roof, cut down the dead tree; he becomes indispensable. Stoic and single-minded, Duro is the kind of man you feel you can trust--someone who feeds abandoned young seagulls or takes home a blind dog who's been tied up and left to die.
As Duro and the girl slowly restore an elaborate mosaic mysteriously plastered over on the side of the Pavic house, though, waves of hostility ripple through Gost and old grudges resurface. Especially furious are Fabjan, the owner of the Zodijak café, who has bullied and manipulated the fortunes of Gost for decades, and Duro's former friend Kresimir, whose ruthless treachery has left scars on the whole town.
Forna, whose previous novel The Memory of Love won the 2011 Commonwealth Prize, has created a convincing narrator in Duro, an uneducated but well-meaning Croatian with a clear sense of life and the truth. His voice is one of the novel's key pleasures--unpretentious and perceptive, tolerant, brooding and sometimes surprising.
Forna's characters reveal their secrets gradually, like the plastered and whitewashed mosaic that is slowly exposed. She constantly shows you what you don't notice, and every sentence shimmers with possible depths--with good reason! A second plot is buried inside the first, one that only comes to light in broken, mosaic-like pieces of memory. The war scenes are quietly horrific. Forna humanizes her victims, which makes their deaths excruciating without being graphic.
The set-up is so cinematic that, as with Hitchcock and DePalma, we watch the past begin to resurface, until the crime the town would like to forget appears to be repeating itself in the middle of Main Street like a scene straight out of Vertigo. The plotting is subtle, the suspense maddening, the set-ups undetectable, the character work masterful--and Forna's surprises go off like time bombs. This is literature with a punch, a perfectly contrived artifice examining the unhealed festering wounds of wartime, in which Forna takes the Croatian nightmare and brings it to life as her own. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: An English family moving into a small Croatian village awakens long-buried anger and secrets from the town's wartime past in this slow-fuse, suspenseful masterpiece.