In ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ by Sally Rooney, one of the protagonists, Alice - a novelist - says,

“The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human “species?”

In this book Aminatta Forna manages precisely such a juxtaposition: She tells the love stories of interesting but never easy protagonists whilst never shying away from the realities of the civil war that casts a shadow over them.

Unlike, her later novel, ‘Happiness’, this book and its characters didn’t grab me immediately and it was only the fact that I’d enjoyed the other book so much, that kept me going through the first few chapters. But this book is a slow burn in which the characters and the background of the civil war in Sierra Leone gradually assume greater and greater depth.

I was listening to the book on audio and there were definitely times when the descriptions of the brutality inflicted on civilians was hard to listen to. But the violence depicted is never gratuitous. In fact, the author is as sparing as she can be with this whilst still vividly getting the point across.

To manage to end this book on a note of hope shows the consummate skill that makes Aminatta Forna one of this century’s most admirable novelists.