In Hall's Broken Country, characters do their duties, find wondrous love, feel heartbreak, suffer tragedies, sometimes act impulsively, and reel from the consequences of all of the above. A mystery surrounds a deadly moment, and the book ends with a hopeful, imperfect, heartbreaking way forward.
Beth and her kind husband Frank live and farm outside the small English village where they grew up. They love each other, but they are able to stay married only because they push down the memories of tragedies that could haunt them, and because secrets from the past stay buried.
But when Frank's brother shoots a dog going after the family's sheep, the gunshot sets into motion events that will change everything.
The dog belonged to Gabriel Wolfe, Beth's childhood love, and his return to town brings back long-suppressed complications around jealousies, love, choices, and the weighty consequences of the past.
I love a farm-life novel, and in Broken Country, Hall creates a background of relentless care, feeding, planting, harvesting, repair, routines, life, and death. Against the straightforward, duty-driven work, Hall sets a complex, twisted set of past affections, heartbreak, vulnerability, and hurt, then offers up faulted, broken, hopeful, impulsive characters who are at times wondrously stoic, and at other times act against their best interests, complicating everything and potentially destroying everything in their wake.
Broken Country is a study of an extreme, life-and-death-stakes fallout after heartbreaking tragedy, but it's also a story of young love blossoming, then shriveling under the first pressures of the outside world; it's a mystery in which duty overpowers the difficult truth; and it's a hopeful view of how an imperfect set of characters can find their clumsy, sometimes beautiful, way forward.
I read this immersive story in a flash.
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I received a prepublication edition of Broken Country courtesy of Simon & Schuster and NetGalley.
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