The Hired Man

AMINATTA FORNA

Publication: Bloomsbury, 2013, London

First edition. Signed and dated by the author. Fine in dust jacket. Duro Kolak is a middle-aged man who lives alone with his two dogs in the small Croatian town of Gost. When an alluring Englishwoman, Laura, and her adolescent children Matthew and Grace take up a local property as a summer holiday home, Duro helps them with repairs to the old house. In doing so they uncover a mosaic beneath the ruined plaster and, in the rising heat of summer, painstakingly restore it. The exposing of this image from the past is strongly indicative of the emergence of other buried undercurrents ... the conflicts that marked the dissolution of Yugoslavia over the 1990s that supposedly have simply vanished away, taking their ghosts and scars with them. Gost, it transpires, is not all that it seems.

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