Broken Country
Clare Leslie Hall, 2025
Historical fiction RomanceContemporary fictionMystery, thriller & crime
A farm, a marriage, and a first love who comes back: a story about the choices made young and the decades spent living with them.
Feels like longing, grief and defiance. About love, memory and nature.
A page from the book
What it takes to keep two griefs from tipping each other over.
Frank and I dance around each other’s sadness. Any couple who has lost a child will tell you the same. You see it in the other, of course you do, but it’s like you’re on a seesaw of grief, and all you want is to avoid tipping the other one down. Clare Leslie Hall.The novel is set in Dorset, in England's West Country, where the farming calendar — lambing, hay, harvest — still governs the year.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Broken Country like?
- Feels like longing, grief and defiance. About love, memory and nature.
- What should I read after Broken Country?
- If you liked Broken Country, try If He Had Been With Me (Laura Nowlin), The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller) and It's Not Summer Without You (Jenny Han).
A taste of the feed
Loving someone so long it stops being a feeling and becomes a body part.
I’ve loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn’t change but grew. It grew to fill the parts of me that I did not have when I was a child. It grew with every new longing of my body and desire until there was not a piece of me that did not love him. And when I look at him, there is no other feeling in me.
If He Had Been With Me · Laura Nowlin
To know someone so well that sight becomes optional.
I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.
The Song of Achilles · Madeline Miller
Grief makes a person feel like a stranger to their own life.
I wasn’t in Cousins. Conrad and I weren’t together, and Susannah was dead. Nothing would ever be the same again. It had been—How many days had it been? How many days exactly?—two months since Susannah had died and I still couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t let myself believe it. When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really and truly gone?
It's Not Summer Without You · Jenny Han
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