Books like The Hired Man
You were drawn, perhaps, to Forna’s ability to make a beautiful landscape feel like both sanctuary and evidence—to the silences, moral unease, and pressure of a past that outsiders cannot see. These novels create that same haunting pressure in very different ways.
If you liked The Hired Man, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Hired Man, and we tell you exactly what.
Like Forna, Ondaatje understands that after political violence, truth survives in fragments: a body, a gesture, a place people avoid discussing. Anil, a forensic anthropologist returning to civil-war-torn Sri Lanka, becomes involved in identifying a skeleton whose very existence is politically dangerous. The investigation matters, but the deeper suspense lies in deciding whom knowledge can save—and whom it may endanger.
Ondaatje’s lyrical prose gives landscape and physical objects the charged presence they have in The Hired Man, while his characters share Duro’s uneasy intimacy with violence and complicity. This Giller Prize-winning novel is dreamlike without ever softening the reality of terror. Its images linger with the force of recovered memories; to miss it would be to miss one of the finest novels about the perilous work of making the buried visible.
Here, as in The Hired Man, transforming a piece of land becomes inseparable from confronting what happened on it. In postwar Malaya, Yun Ling Teoh—scarred by her imprisonment in a Japanese camp—asks an enigmatic former gardener to the emperor of Japan to create a memorial garden. Their collaboration places beauty, resentment, discipline, and historical guilt in continual tension.
Tan makes gardening feel like an art of memory: every stone and sightline conceals intention, just as Forna’s Croatian house and countryside carry meanings invisible to visitors. The novel is more sensuous and ceremonious than Forna’s, but equally alert to the danger of turning atrocity into a comforting story. Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize and shortlisted for the Booker, it has the rare authority of a novel whose beauty cannot be separated from its moral severity.
A thirteen-year-old girl disappears while visiting an English village. McGregor then refuses the conventional satisfactions of a thriller: the seasons continue, animals breed and die, marriages alter, children grow up, and the village absorbs the disappearance without ever escaping it.
That makes Reservoir 13 an unexpectedly close companion to The Hired Man. Both novels show how a community’s public routines coexist with private knowledge, and how landscape can seem indifferent while retaining every human trace. McGregor’s patient, recurring sentences create an accumulation of tiny details until ordinary life itself becomes suspenseful. The Costa Novel Award winner is formally daring but intensely readable—a hypnotic book that changes your sense of what a community is and what it means for a place to remember.