Aminatta Forna made her name with her memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water, which documents the circumstances surrounding the death of her father, a Sierra Leonean politician who was hanged on charges of treason in 1975. In The Hired Man she returns to her speciality theme of the psychology of civil conflict, but in a different setting – the small, aptly named, Croatian town of Gost, a place ravaged by the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

The book's narrator is Duro Kolak, an introspective handyman who grew up in the town. His memories of the immediate and the distant past are intertwined – a familiar device in contemporary fiction, but one that particularly suits the novel's subject matter. Laura, a naive middle-class Englishwoman, arrives in Gost with her two children to renovate a pretty house on the town's outskirts. Duro, who is intimately acquainted with the house, offers his services. The renovation functions as a slightly obvious metaphor for the resurrection of difficult and complicated memories.

We learn that, beneath the surface, life in Gost is anything but the simple pastoral idyll Laura had anticipated. Petty interactions between the town's inhabitants conceal a terrible history. With her beautifully precise style, Forna sensitively depicts members of a community resuming day-to-day life after violent civil conflict – each with the knowledge of the heinous crimes they committed against one another. The Hired Man is an ingenious examination of the kind of ghosts that those with no experience of civil war are unable to see.