Broken Country (Reese's Book Club)

by Clare Leslie Hall

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A marriage shrouded in secrets and a town pulsing with tension, this is a love story unlike any other. Both passionate and propulsive, Broken Country is a poignant tale of love, loss, guilt and grief.

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK | A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and the choices that shape our lives…but it’s also a masterfully crafted mystery that will keep you guessing until the very last page. Seriously, that ending?! I did not see it coming.” —Reese Witherspoon

“Stirring and mysterious…fires directly at the human heart and hits the mark.” —Delia Owens, New York Times bestselling author of Where the Crawdads Sing

A love triangle unearths dangerous, deadly secrets from the past in this thrilling tale perfect for fans of The Paper Palace and Where the Crawdads Sing.

“The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668078204
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	03/04/2025
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	386
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Clare Leslie Hall is a novelist and journalist who lives in the wilds of Dorset, England, with her family. She’s the author of Broken Country, Pictures of Him, and Days You Were Mine.

Editorial Reviews

01/20/2025

English writer Hall serves up twist after twist in her canny U.S. debut, a story of grief, love, and murder set in the Dorset countryside. The year is 1968 and Beth Johnson, wife of gentle sheep farmer Frank, remains shattered by the death of her nine-year-old son, Bobby, in an accident two years earlier. Her first love, Gabriel, a bestselling novelist who grew up wealthy on a nearby estate, returns with his young son, Leo, after separating from his American wife. Beth reconnects with Gabriel, fantasizing about rewinding her life to a simpler time, and she forges a bond with Leo, who reminds her of Bobby. An unreliable narrator, Beth provides a blinkered view of the action, mentioning early on that a farmer has been murdered and someone close to her is on trial for the crime, but neglecting to reveal the identities of these two characters until more than halfway through the narrative. As a result, readers are kept guessing about the precise consequences of Gabriel’s return and the circumstances behind Bobby’s death. Hall makes Beth a fascinatingly complex lead who vacillates between restlessness and contentment, and the other characters’ motivations prove to be different than they seem at first glance. This sharp morality tale will stay with readers. Agent: Hattie Grunewald, Blair Partnership. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK
A New York Times Bestseller

"Layered and lyrical, this stunning novel expertly builds suspense while revealing its secrets, and it conveys deep truths about love and loss."—People

“Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and the choices that shape our lives...but it’s also a masterfully crafted mystery that will keep you guessing until the very last page. Seriously, that ending?! I did not see it coming.”—Reese Witherspoon

"Sure to top all of 2025’s 'Best Of' lists, Broken Country is a triumphant and truly exciting release from an author guaranteed to become your next favorite. Trust me, this is the one you’ve been waiting for."—Book Reporter

“With an opening line of “The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him,” Broken Country doesn’t waste any time getting you into this sweeping family drama."—USA Today

“In this twisty love story, the happily married Beth is forced to confront her past demons and desires after her brother-in-law shoots a dog belonging to Gabriel, her teenage love who has just returned to town.”—New York Post

“With its sweeping narrative and pulse-pounding suspense, the novel offers a sometimes-jarring reminder that the past, no matter how deeply buried, always finds a way to resurface.”—Post & Courier

"Broken Country is at its heart a novel about love and loss, about selfishness and selflessness, and about the consequences of decisions made for these reasons. Each decision is driven by the one before it, and Beth, especially, is stretched to her breaking point. Both aching and thrilling, Broken Country is a masterful book by an accomplished author."—Booklist

"[Hall's] prose is so transportive that it’s impossible not to hang on...an elegantly written historical novel with a compelling love triangle and a couple of clever twists."—Kirkus

"Hall serves up twist after twist in her canny U.S. debut, a story of grief, love, and murder set in the Dorset countryside. This sharp morality tale will stay with readers."—Publishers Weekly

“A love story like no other. By turns a searing mystery, and a brilliant and beautiful look at the price of a second chance, and the complex notion of fate and forgiveness. Stunning."—Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of All the Colors of the Dark

“Stirring, poetic and mysterious, Clare Leslie Hall’s novel, Broken Country, reveals how tender and innocent love between a boy and a girl can alter the lives of families for generations. Even on a quaint and quiet sheep farm of rural England, misguided passion brings murder and criminal charges against the most innocent of players because human nature is far from tame. Yet, even as love destroys, it can return to heal on the same sacred meadow where it was first conceived. This evocative, sensitive and compelling novel fires directly at the human heart and hits the mark.”—Delia Owens, New York Times bestselling author of Where the Crawdads Sing

“Broken Country is a beautifully observed and brilliantly constructed page-turner of novel. It has everything – love, loss, fury, forgiveness – and I was absolutely immersed from page one.”—Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes and The Half Moon

“Broken Country is mesmerizing: delicate and forceful, lyrical, brutal, and passionate. I devoured it.”—Miranda Cowley Heller, New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace

“Broken Country combines the intoxicating passion of Sally Rooney's Normal People with the hard-won wisdom of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. It is also as romantic about the British countryside as Elena Ferrante is about Naples. Both a love story and a pulsing suspense, you could wait a lifetime for a novel as good as this.”—Jo Furniss, author of The Last to Know

"It’s a story that could have been told by one of the Brontës or Charles Dickens, and author Clare Leslie Hall does right by it, creating compellingly flawed, three-dimensional characters and placing them in an artfully rendered time and place. In fact, the setting is so distinct, it’s almost as if the English countryside becomes a character in itself."—Apple Books

From the Publisher

Stirring and mysterious…fires directly at the human heart and hits the mark.”

#1 New York Times bestselling author Delia Owens

Stirring and mysterious…fires directly at the human heart and hits the mark.”

New York Times bestselling author Delia Owens

A marriage shrouded in secrets and a town pulsing with tension, this is a love story unlike any other. Both passionate and propulsive, Broken Country is a poignant tale of love, loss, guilt and grief.”

Barnes&Noble.com

2025-01-18
Unchecked passion gives rise to tragedy in a small English farming community in the late 1960s.

In 1968, bookish Beth Johnson adores being a farmer’s wife. Though she is not a poet, as she once dreamed, her life laboring in commune with nature is one “where every single day is a different kind of education.” She feels satisfied, especially as she gets to share her moments of rest with her husband, Frank, a reliable and compassionate man, and their close-knit network of family and friends. And yet, there is a seeping wound in their busy life: the loss of their 9-year-old son, Bobby, who died in an accident two years before. When Beth’s first love, Gabriel, unexpectedly moves back to town with his son, Leo, a boy just a bit older than Bobby who is desperately seeking a mother figure, Beth and the reader are blown back to “before”: 1955, before Beth knew what it was to love or to grieve. In addition, Hall intersperses scenes set at a 1969 murder trial so that, though she intentionally obscures the identities of the victim and the suspect until the climax, death crouches over the entire novel. As we watch Beth and Gabriel fall toward one another in two timelines, we are painfully aware that heartbreak is imminent in each. One would think it would be hard to shake this feeling of doom, especially since Hall also makes it clear that Beth will break her commitment to Frank early on, but her prose is so transportive that it’s impossible not to hang on and hold out hope for Beth, Frank, Gabriel, and the people they love. There are several standout scenes, but an especially stunning one comes when Frank’s brother, Jimmy, helps Beth deliver Bobby on the kitchen floor during a violent storm. Indeed, every scene that includes Bobby is touching, especially those that highlight his connection with the land—the characteristic Beth most prizes in Frank and is proud to have found within herself. Crystallized in Beth’s memory as a “boy reaching back to his ancestors through these lumpy green fields, to the sounds and sights, the taste, the touch of a thousand years,” he is without time, like love and loss.

An elegantly written historical novel with a compelling love triangle and a couple of clever twists.

Kirkus Reviews