Broken Country – Clare Leslie Hall
Let’s get this out of the way: Beth — the protagonist of “Broken Country” — is one of my least favorite literary characters of all time. Manipulative, self-pitying and ultimately corrosive to everyone around her, she acts less out of confusion than unrecognized entitlement.
Yet, Clare Leslie Hall renders her with such interiority and emotional texture that I couldn’t look away, even as I found myself rooting against her by the final chapters. That friction is what gives the novel its charge. Hall isn’t writing heroes or villains, she’s writing about people who believe their own rationalizations – even as they unravel the lives of others.
The story unfolds across two timelines: the “Before,” when Beth, her future husband Frank, and her first love Gabriel are teenagers in a post-war English village; and 1968, when their paths collide again after years of silence and buried grief. The novel opens with a deceptively minor (but shocking) incident — a man shoots a dog attacking livestock — and spirals into a complex web of compromised morality.
This isn’t a mystery. We’re told early on that a child has died, a marriage is strained and violence is looming. What keeps you turning pages isn’t what happens, but how these characters get there, and the damage they do to each other along the way.
[major spoilers below]
Beth cheats on Frank — a man who, by all accounts, is loyal, emotionally present and still deeply in love with her. She rekindles her relationship with Gabriel at her brother-in-law’s wedding, barely bothering to hide it. She does it not in a moment of weakness, but with an almost casual disregard for the consequences.
We’re told again and again how close Beth and Frank remained even after the death of their son, Bobby. And yet, the minute Gabriel reappears, she reignites a relationship that burned out over a decade ago — a relationship she chose to leave and that Frank begs her to keep at a distance.
My husband and I had very different reads on Beth. He saw her as tragic — still reeling from her son’s death, harboring unspoken resentment toward Frank. I couldn’t disagree more. I hated her like I hate people who justify their selfishness by pretending they’re the ones who’ve been wronged. She’s not some doomed romantic, she’s emotionally reckless at best and sociopathic at worst.
By the end of the novel, Beth is raising a child with the help of her parents and running the farm while Frank — the man she betrayed — serves eight years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. It read to me as narrative indulgence; a soft landing for someone who never faced accountability for the wreckage she caused.
To be clear, Beth is not alone in her failures. Frank, who takes the fall for Gabriel’s son Leo after Leo kills Frank’s brother in self-defense, is the most literal and figurative definition of a cuckold. He’s so hollowed out by grief and guilt that he volunteers to go to prison to protect a child who isn’t his — a child who killed his brother. Um, what?
It’s a choice that reads less like selflessness than chosen martyrdom. Frank is the kicked dog who keeps coming back, and at some point, that kind of devotion stops being noble and starts being pitiful.
Gabriel is a bit one-note: passive, brooding and profoundly complicit in all the dirty deeds. He lets Frank take the blame, encourages Beth’s descent into infidelity and ultimately walks away untouched, but with a killer idea for a new novel. The fact that he covers Frank’s legal fees doesn’t make him honorable, it makes him a coward with a checkbook.
[spoilers ended]
All of that said — and I say this with absolute conviction — “Broken Country” is a great read. The prose is spare and quietly devastating, the pacing across the two timelines is seamless and the characters’ world feels lived-in.
The audiobook, narrated by Hattie Morahan, is an excellent companion to the text. While her upper-class delivery occasionally clashes with the rural setting, her performance in the final chapters carries real emotional heft.
All-in-all, this is a character study about cowardice, about how grief calcifies into cruelty and how love can be a weapon or a shield. Beth and Frank may deserve each other — one manipulative, the other endlessly willing to be manipulated — but I’d never want to be anywhere near either of them.
“Broken Country” is the kind of novel that leaves you arguing with yourself and with anyone else who reads it. Book clubs, take note.
Rating (story): 4/5 stars
Rating (narration): 4/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: June 4 – June 7, 2025
Multi-tasking: Once you get through the first few chapters and have a handle on the timeline and key players, it’s easy to follow – no matter what else you’re doing.
