The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna

When an Englishwoman arrives in the small Croatian town of Gost with her family, she surprises the locals with her delight in the blue house she has bought as a summer retreat, a cottage that hasn't been lived in for over a decade. With her husband stuck at work in London, Laura will need someone to help with repairs - and luckily, her neighbour, Duro Kolak, is soon on hand to help out, becoming the hired man of the title.
    Duro lives alone in a shack nearby with his two dogs, making ends meet by doing odd jobs and hunting, though really he can turn his hand to anything. He can speak English too, which is just as well for Laura, who is surprised when shopkeepers cannot understand her requests.
    Over the weeks that follow, Duro helps renovate the house, fix the roof, and organise an electric water pump. In the outbuildings the family discover an old car, a red Fico, which Duro resuscitates much to the delight of bored teenager, Matthew. Laura's daughter, Grace, uncovers a mosaic on the outside front wall of the house and a tiled fountain which Duro encourages her to restore.  He takes the family to the waterhole he swam in as a boy and on outings to nearby towns.
    On the surface, the story seems to be about the relationship, often awkward, between the English family and this helpful local. One can't help but wonder why this intelligent, middle-aged man continues to live in a town which his own family have deserted. He doesn't really have any friends either - he chats tensely with Fabjan, owner of the local bar whom he patently despises. There is an obvious rift between Duro and his old schoolmate, Kresimir. Duro seems too genial to be an obvious loner. And why are the local people of Gost so curiously unhelpful towards the English family, who bring a little extra money to a town with little economic viability?
    Just as the mosaic's picture emerges, so too does Duro's own history, a story bound up in events of the war for independence of the early 1990s when Gost was surrounded by Serbian forces. The war took its toll on many families, including Duro's own, as shells were lobbed at houses and snipers took potshots at innocent people. It also brought out a simmering resentment which turned ordinary people against their neighbours, leading to unspeakable acts of violence.
   The truly awful nature of these events is slowly revealed, interwoven with the experiences of the English family, and the restoration of the blue house, which becomes a stark reminder of things the people of Gost would rather were left dead and buried. Everyone except Duro, that is.
    While he is an easy character to scoff at - Laura's husband calls Duro her 'pocket Romeo' because of his short stature, and he is certainly vain with his daily regime of chin-ups, press-ups and stomach crunches - Dura turns out to be a real hero. Perhaps it is the tragic events that have dogged his life, but instead of becoming bitter, or running away, Duro stands watch, waiting and daring to remember.
    Animatta Forna has written a wonderful novel about the lingering effects of war, what it can do to a community and how individuals carry on with their lives afterwards. She is a stunning writer, creating the place of Gost in the reader's imagination, a summer landscape full of flowers, odours and heat. The serious nature of the story leaves you wanting to know more about events that you may dimly remember being played out on TV screens twenty years ago. It is as if, like Duro, she is daring you not to forget. On top of this The Hired Man is a terrific piece of storytelling - I found it really hard to put down and will be eager to read Forna's previous books.

The Savage Garden by Mark Mills

House of the Hanged, the last Mark Mills novel I read, was set in the Riviera, between the wars, which made a stunning setting for a very exciting plot. The Savage Garden takes an equally charming landscape, in this case a country estate on the outskirts of Florence in the 1950s, and weaves it into an enthralling mystery story based on a garden.
    Adam Banting, a young Cambridge scholar is sent to stay at the home of frail Francesca Docci, an old friend of his art history professor, to write his thesis around the design of her garden. This was built in memory of the beautiful Flora Docci,  mistress of the estate four hundred years before. Her untimely death as a young woman supposedly propelled her husband into such grief that he later commissioned the garden in her honour, but as Adam soon realises, Signor Docci left clues that point to murder.
    Ever since, the Docci family has been plagued by bad luck and, dare one say it, evil. As recently as World War Two, Francesca's son Emilio was shot dead by the German soldiers who had commandeered the villa. The death was completely unnecessary, as the soldiers were about to leave before the advancing Allied Forces drove them out. But was this death as straightforward as it seems?
    Adam is a clever chap, he's a Cambridge scholar after all, and fired by the success he has in deciphering the mystery of the garden, he soon turns his mind towards an alternative reason for Emilio's death and his suspicions lie far closer to home. The suspense begins to creep up the scale a notch or two and it seems sooner or later, Adam's investigations will to lead to danger.
    This is a classic mystery story, peopled with characters glamorous enough to match the scenery. The Doccis are all stunningly good looking, and Adam soon takes a shine to Antonella, Francesca's granddaughter who has a dangerous reputation for breaking hearts. Francesca herself is a grand old lady with an iron will and lots of interesting stories, and while Adam's artist brother, Harry, provides useful assistance in the solving of the garden puzzle, his outgoing personality and knack for getting into scrapes with women add a lot of colour to the novel.
   There's also the attractive Signora Fanelli, the innkeeper who reminds Adam of a wiry Gina Lollobrigida, and her rustic acquaintance, Fausto, who loves to talk politics and has an ex-partisan army background.  The settings are also lovingly described, from Fausto's charming farm to the villa in all its shabbily-genteel glory. The garden itself, with its classical art, grottoes and secret corners is a masterful work of invention and the mystery its clues eventually display a clever piece of artifice.
    Reading The Savage Garden is a bit like taking in a sumptuously beautiful movie - are all novels set in Italy like this? Mills has a knack for visual description that manages not to slow down the plot. Adam and his brother have many lively discussions, and if you have an interest in art history, Dante's Inferno, or classical mythology, this is a definite bonus.
    If I must choose between the two, I probably enjoyed House of the Hanged a little more than this novel, because there is something callow about Adam that can be a bit annoying at times, which as it turns out, is necessary for the plot. Either book will give you an enjoyable distraction, this is definitely an author with a talent for transporting you to another time and place.

Small Wars by Sadie Jones

Sadie Jones made a terrific debut with her novel, The Outcast, one of those stories involving family secrets, a tragic death and an awkward main character trying to make sense of it all when all the world seems against him. It was altogether stunning and I have been meaning to catch up with Jones's Small Wars, for quite some time.
    While not quite in the same class as The Outcast for a compelling character and gripping storyline, Small Wars is I think a more thought provoking novel. It describes a little-known part of British history, for me anyway - the British forces involvement in Cyprus during the 1950s - and the effects of army policy on those caught up in it all - in particular the soldiers and their wives.
    Yes, this is another soldiers' wives sort of story, but done tremendously subtly here, as you might expect, because Jones is one of those authors who can get right inside her characters and make them real.
    These include Major Hal Traherne, a talented young officer with a bright future, and his lovely wife, Clara, who has just arrived on Cyprus with their twin daughters. They are eventually housed safely in the army compound with other army families, but there is the perpetual problem with any kind of war, for men and families alike: long spells of tedium broken up by moments of violence and terror.
    Cyprus is a challenge in that although it is a 'small war', it has its particular difficulties. The Cypriot rebels use guerilla tactics often resulting in British casualties before vanishing into the mountains. To maintain control the British have to come down hard on the rebels in a way that makes one wonder where the Geneva Convention would stand in all of this. The things Hal sees and does he cannot discuss with Clara, so the war becomes a wedge between them, affecting Hal's behaviour to her and their marriage.
    Clara meanwhile tries to be the correct army wife, smiling and caring for her children. But it is a tremendously lonely time for her, and she finds friends few and far between. The thin walls that separate their house from that of Mark and Deirdre reveal a marriage in strife. Deirdre is obviously not being a good army wife, but Clara does her best to be supportive none the less. Another friend is Davis, a young classics scholar doing his compulsory military service as a translator, an important role that he frequently finds disturbing, witnessing as he does some very unpleasant interrogations.
    The story centres on the struggles the characters each experience in this small war to do what is expected of them while maintaining a facade of normal life as the violence around them intensifies. This eventually explodes into the lives of Hal and Clara, throwing them into an unenviable crisis that has life-changing effects.
    Sadie Jones does well at recreating what it might have been like on Cyprus at this time, and the book has a lot to say about the patriarchal system that dominated British colonial policy. I am sure the lengths the British went to to maintain their colonial interests here and in other parts of the world seemed perfectly justifiable in the past. We might think we know better now, but sadly there are still small wars and that is probably not going to change. As I said before, this book gives you a lot to think about.