ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall will be published on 4th March by John Murray. My huge thanks to the author who very kindly sent me a copy for review.

You can find my reviews of Him and Mine by the author writing as Clare Empson by clicking on the titles.

Everyone in the village said nothing good would come of Gabriel’s return. And as Beth looks at the man she loves on trial for murder, she can’t help thinking they were right.

Beth was seventeen when she first met Gabriel. Over that heady, intense summer, he made her think and feel and see differently. She thought it was the start of her great love story. When Gabriel left to become the person his mother expected him to be, she was broken.

It was Frank who picked up the pieces and together they built a home very different from the one she’d imagined with Gabriel. Watching her husband and son, she remembered feeling so sure that, after everything, this was the life she was supposed to be leading.

But when Gabriel comes back, all Beth’s certainty about who she is and what she wants crumbles. Even after ten years, their connection is instant. She knows it’s wrong and she knows people could get hurt. But how can she resist a second chance at first love?

A love story with the pulse of a thriller, Broken Country is a heart-pounding novel of impossible choices and devastating consequences.

Broken Country is a multi-layered, beautifully written story of first love, enduring passion and second chances. Beth and Gabriel fell in love when they were just kids really, seventeen and head over heels in an all-consuming love affair. It’s Frank who rescued Beth when it all went wrong and offered her a home on his family farm, his love and the warm embrace of his own family. Beth loves Frank intensely but the unfinished business with Gabriel is hovering in the background waiting to resurface and turn Beth and Frank’s lives upside down once again, for Beth also still loves Gabriel.

I can’t think of anybody else who writes such achingly exquisite stories about the pain of all-encompassing love in the way that Clare Leslie Hall does. If you haven’t read her other books (written as Clare Empson but soon to be republished as Hall) then I heartily recommend you do so as you will find similar features there. It’s the main reason why I love her writing and why I was so thrilled when I heard about Broken Country.

The characterisations are utterly sublime, from Beth struggling with her feelings, to Gabriel’s intensity, to Frank’s stoic support. Each of these three main players jumps off the page and I felt like I was right there with them. The other supporting characters are just as well-formed and I very much liked the setting of the farm which felt like a character of its own, continuing to draw Beth in and provide salvation to her.

If you want a an epic love story that burrows its way deep into your heart then Broken Country is for you. The way Hall depicts heartbreak is so so special and tears were shed!. It is the work of a writer par excellence.

Clare Leslie Hall’s novel Broken Country will be published on March 4 by Simon & Schuster in the US and John Murray in the UK. It is also being translated into 29 languages worldwide and a film adaptation of the novel is in development with Sony 3000 and Hello Sunshine.

Clare spent the first half of her career as a journalist on national newspapers before publishing two novels HIM and MINE under the name Clare Empson in the UK and Germany. The novels are being republished under the name Clare Leslie Hall as Pictures of Him and Days You Were Mine.

Her favourite novels – The Great Gatsby, The Secret History, Moon Tiger and The Go-Between – set a blueprint for the kind of books Clare loves to read and now write. Her three novels all combine passionate love stories with an element of mystery and suspense.

Clare is married with three children and lives in Dorset in an old farmhouse surrounded by fields, which inspired the setting for Broken Country.