Aminatta Forna Books in Order

Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland to a Sierra Leonean father and a Scottish mother. She was raised between Sierra Leone and Great Britain, while her childhood also included stretches in Iran, Thailand, and Zambia. That movement between countries, languages, and versions of home runs through much of her work.

Her father, Mohamed Forna, was a physician and politician in Sierra Leone. His arrest and execution after opposing the government left a lasting mark on her family, and later gave Forna a deeply personal reason to write about memory, political violence, and what families are left to carry.

Forna studied law at University College London and later held a Harkness Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Before publishing books, she spent a decade working for the BBC as a journalist and documentary maker, covering arts and political stories for radio and television.

The reporting years taught her how much can sit beneath the official version of events.

Her first book, Mother Of All Myths, looks at the social expectations placed on mothers and the stubborn idea of the “perfect” mother. In 2002 she published The Devil That Danced on the Water, a memoir that returns to her Sierra Leonean childhood and her search for the truth about her father's death. It is both a family story and an account of a country living with the consequences of dictatorship.

Forna moved into fiction with Ancestor Stones, in which a woman gathers the stories of four aunts from a Sierra Leonean family. The novel follows their lives across decades of change, showing how private choices and national history can become tangled together. Readers who enjoy large family stories, shifting viewpoints, and places that feel fully lived in often find a natural starting point there.

Her later novels keep asking what people do after upheaval. The Memory of Love follows several lives in postwar Sierra Leone, including a British psychologist, a surgeon, and an older man haunted by the choices he made years earlier. In The Hired Man, a Croatian village and an abandoned house become the setting for a slow reveal about war, silence, and the danger of digging into a community's past.

Then there is Happiness, a London novel with foxes, immigrants, a missing child, and two strangers pulled into each other's lives.

In 2021, Forna published The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion, a collection of essays that ranges through travel, history, family, animals, migration, and belonging. Across fiction and nonfiction, she returns to people who are in transit, people carrying old losses, and people trying to make a home without ignoring the past.

Her work has received major literary recognition, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Memory of Love. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was appointed OBE in 2017. Beyond writing, she founded the Rogbonko Project, which supports education and community projects in Sierra Leone. She serves as Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University and is also a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.