Readers of all genres know the exact moment when you read a book that somehow combines everything you love from each --- the taut plotting of a mystery, the bated breath of a romance, the crystalline writing of literary fiction --- into something far greater than the sum of its parts. Recent novels that seem to hit the mark for most include WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING and THE PAPER PALACE…and now BROKEN COUNTRY, the US debut of English novelist Clare Leslie Hall.

Ever since joining the Johnson family, Beth has become every bit the farmer’s wife. Despite her teenage dreams of going to Oxford and becoming a writer, she finds that she loves the pastoral life and the stability that it --- and her compassionate, kind husband, Frank --- represent. She loves waking up to feed her men; tending to the weeding; assisting with the animals; and the musky, earthen scent that wafts off her husband as they make love every night. She is even able to find similarities between her bookish dreams and life at Blakely Farm, “where every single day is a different kind of education.”

Beth is the first to acknowledge that farm life is full of tragedies --- including the death of her young son, Bobby, in an accident two years earlier --- but her life with Frank and his brother, Jimmy, has taught her that there’s a resounding clarity and peace that comes with tending to the land. For a while now, that has been enough to sustain her. Until 1968, when hotshot celebrity author Gabriel Wolfe returns to his mansion in their humble hometown of Hemston in North Dorset.

"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."

Gabriel, always the subject of the town’s ire as an outsider, was once the only person who seemed to understand Beth, and their love affair as teenagers was earth-shattering, illuminating and groundbreaking. Frank is fully aware of their history, but while Gabriel married an American woman and made a career as a lauded writer, Beth has remained at Blakely right by his side. Still, the connection between Beth and Gabriel exists as a sort of land mine at the center of Beth and Frank’s marriage --- a topic better left undiscussed and undisturbed.

So, naturally, disturbance comes the way it always does: at the worst time and in the worst possible way. A dog belonging to Gabriel’s son, Leo, escapes and heads right for the Blakely Farm’s lambs, forcing Jimmy to shoot it. Farm life may be brutal, but no one is prepared to take away an innocent boy’s dog…especially when it happens to belong to the man your brother’s wife once loved. Unfortunately for the Johnsons, this tragedy exposes fault lines in their marriage when Beth takes it upon herself to help Leo acquire a new dog and begin training it.

If there is one thing that Clare Leslie Hall makes clear early on, it’s that the love between Beth and Frank is steadfast, made of stronger stuff than your average romance. So it is not without great consideration that Frank asks Beth, “Should I be worried about you spending time with Wolfe and his son?” He’s not only referring to their past; he senses that Beth is seeking something inappropriate in her connection to Leo, so close to the age that Bobby was when they lost him. When Beth answers no, she really means it. It is, after all, only the beginning. However, in the pages that follow, she is thrust back to “before,” the year 1955, when she and Gabriel fell in love. Her answer, now held privately, changes more than once as she revisits her summer of love with Gabriel and the miscommunication that tore them apart.

The loss of their son is something that Beth and Frank have been able to move on from, as they fall in love with each other again, but there is one major milestone they have yet to cross. They are so consumed by guilt and grief that they have stopped talking about Bobby and remembering him. So when Beth finds herself talking to Leo and Gabriel about him, she feels, for the first time in a while, truly happy. She loves Frank like she loves air, but she also loves Gabriel and the way that his affection feels like a vortex back to the young girl she used to be, full of dreams and empty of pain. Before long, her emotional affair turns physical, Frank begins spending nights at the pub, and her brother-in-law, already mercurial, takes the potential dissolution of his family poorly. Beth’s once routine life now seems like a soap opera, with the farmer’s wife bedding the town celebrity. But in alternating chapters, we learn of the affair’s shocking outcome: murder.

It would be a huge disservice to the cleverly constructed plot that Hall has developed to reveal the victim, or even the main suspect. But the scent of death, of injustice and hardship, settles over the novel like a fog, keeping you on your toes even in moments of peace and beauty. Like the pastoral landscape it so vividly brings to life, BROKEN COUNTRY is made up of contrasts: the warm traditions of the countryside and the rigid old guard; the lively animals and the devastation of the food chain; the strength of enduring, well-tended love; and the dizzying experience of first love. Beth embodies this sense of dissonance, but she is so elegantly crafted and believably real that even her bad choices carry an air of tragic beauty, a sense of the fleetingness of nostalgia and the wicked desire to cling to it.

But it is in the characters of Frank and Bobby where Hall truly shines. If Frank, reliable and steady, is the novel’s breathing lungs, then Bobby --- and his deep, generational connection to the land his family has tended for decades --- is its beating heart. Though we meet him only in memory, it is impossible to ignore his influence on Hall’s plot and characters, and how gorgeously she ties the tragedy, murder and mayhem back together again, the very same way that nature always returns to itself.

I fear that calling BROKEN COUNTRY the embodiment of the pastoral is starting to sound like a broken record, but there’s no better comparison for a novel as brutal and beautiful as this one. Hall is wickedly clever in her intentional obfuscation of her murder plot, her writing is elegantly cadenced, and her cunning is bolstered and backed by her deep, perceptive portrayals of girlhood and womanhood, love of all kinds, and the ways in which guilt shapes and redeems us.

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.