CANR
WORK TITLE: Broken Country
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Dorset
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and former journalist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Clare Leslie Hall is a writer and former journalist. Under the pseudonym Clare Empson, she published the noir novels, Pictures of Him and Days You Were Mine. Hall then turned to writing in the book club fiction subgenre with Broken Country.
The novel, Broken Country, is set in 1968 in an English farming community. Beth Johnson enjoys her life as a farmer’s wife despite not following her dreams to become a poet. She surrounds herself with family, friends, and her reliable husband, Frank. They maintain a busy life, which has prevented either of them from properly dealing with the loss of their nine-year-old son, Bobby, who died in an accident two years previously. Beth’s first love, Gabriel, moves back to town with his son, who appears to be only a few years older than Bobby would have been. Bobby’s desire for a motherly figure in his life stirs memories in Beth about her time with Gabriel. Beth and Gabriel rekindle their relationship in the present, while a parallel court case over a mystery murder takes place.
In an article in People, Hall shared her thoughts on what she hoped readers would take away from reading Broken Country. Hall confessed: “I really hope that they connect with Beth’s journey because she goes through so much in the novel and has a lot thrown at her…. But I hope that they’ll come away being happy and satisfied with her outcome.”
A contributor to Publishers Weekly remarked that the author crafted “Beth a fascinatingly complex lead who vacillates between restlessness and contentment.” The same critic commented that “this sharp morality tale will stay with readers.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor admitted that “every scene that includes Bobby is touching, especially those that highlight his connection with the land.” The Kirkus Reviews critic concluded by calling Broken Country “an elegantly written historical novel with a compelling love triangle and a couple of clever twists.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2025, review of Broken Country.
People, March 5, 2025, Carly Tagen-Dye, “Reese Witherspoon Says Clare Leslie Hall’s Novel Broken Country Touched an ‘Essential Human Part of Me.’”
Publishers Weekly, January 20, 2025, review of Broken Country, p. 31.
ONLINE
Blair Partnership website, https://www.theblairpartnership.com/ (August 24, 2025), author profile.
Clare Leslie Hall
Author
Agent: Hattie Grünewald
Clare Leslie Hall is a novelist and journalist. She published two domestic noir novels HIM and MINE under the name Clare Empson and has turned to book group fiction with her third novel BROKEN COUNTRY.
BROKEN COUNTRY is set to be published in over 30 territories and, since UK and US publication, is a Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller. It was also Reese’s Book Club Pick and Fearne Cotton’s The Happy Place Book Club pick for March 2025. It has been optioned by 3000 pictures with Hello Sunshine producing.
Clare has always loved The Go Between by LP Hartley and BROKEN COUNTRY has a nod to it, featuring a forbidden love affair with catastrophic repercussions.
Clare lives in Dorset with her family.
Reese Witherspoon Says Clare Leslie Hall’s Novel Broken Country Touched an ‘Essential Human Part of Me’ (Exclusive)
PEOPLE spoke with Witherspoon and Hall, whose novel is Reese's Book Club's March selection, at an Apple Books event on March 4
By Carly Tagen-Dye Published on March 5, 2025 04:20PM EST
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Clare Leslie Hall (left), Reese Witherspoon and the cover of 'Broken Country'
Clare Leslie Hall (left), Reese Witherspoon and the cover of 'Broken Country'.
Credit : Marion Curtis/StarPix; Simon & Schuster
When Reese Witherspoon first read Clare Leslie Hall’s new novel Broken Country, she couldn’t put it down.
“I read it in one sitting. I was on an airplane and I just cried so hard,” Witherspoon told PEOPLE at a March 4 event for Reese’s Book Club held in New York City in conjunction with Apple Books. “It touched this really essential human part of me that I think is very universal: this idea of your first love being lost, and then this opportunity to find that true love one more time and have one more opportunity.”
Broken Country, which is the March selection for Witherspoon’s book club, follows Beth, a woman living on a sheep farm with her husband Frank. When Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog that comes onto the couple’s property, Beth learns that the dog belonged to Gabriel, a man who broke her heart when she was younger.
Gabriel is now the father of a young son who reminds Beth of her own late child, and as Beth and Gabriel return to one another's lives, old secrets resurface too. As tensions rise, Beth to must come to terms with her past and future.
The cover of 'Broken Country' by Clare Leslie Hall
The cover of 'Broken Country' by Clare Leslie Hall.
Simon & Schuster
Set in the 1950s and 1960s, Broken Country, which Hall said was influenced by Ian McEwan’s Atonement and L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, straddles multiple genres: reading like a thriller, romance and courtroom drama at once.
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“As an author, you are told to stay in your lane, but I think those are the books I like to read, and those are the books that I seem to write,” Hall, also the author of the forthcoming novels Days You Were Mine (Aug. 26) and Pictures of Him (Sept. 30) told PEOPLE. “So I was just writing what was in my heart.”
The novel’s setting of Dorset, England, is also a special place for the author. She currently lives there with her family, and in addition to knowing its ins and outs — from its rolling fields to quaint pubs — Hall’s property also inspired one of the book's pivotal scenes.
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“We live in a very old farmhouse in Dorset,” Hall said. “My husband was out running with our youngest son's puppy, and it was lambing season. The farmer threatened to shoot him because he'd strayed into a field of lambs.”
Clare Leslie Hall at the Reese's Book Club x Apple Books event on March 4 in New York
Clare Leslie Hall.
Marion Curtis/StarPix
“That did not happen, thank goodness, but this love triangle popped into my head,” the author added. “I could see them. I could see the farmer and his wife, I could see the boy and his father, and I just knew that there was something between the boy's father and the farmer's wife. That spark is in the opening [scene] and it's never really changed.”
What did change throughout the writing process, however, was the perspective of Broken Country. Hall said that she originally intended for the novel to be contemporary, and to feature the voices of all three main characters, before she found her way to the story that really wanted to be told.
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“I realized it was a woman's story, and I also realized it felt period to me,” she said. “I wanted to show Beth's struggle as a young woman trying to forge her way through prejudice, so it worked to change the timeline.”
The novel is a fitting pick for Witherspoon’s book club, which has been elevating female-focused narratives since it was first founded in 2017.
Reese Witherspoon at the Reese's Book Club x Apple Books event on March 4 in New York
Reese Witherspoon at the Reese's Book Club x Apple Books event on March 4 in New York.
Marion Curtis/StarPix
“I am always looking for an extraordinary story about a woman overcoming different odds,” Witherspoon said. “I think women have these very unique paths in life and are faced with myriad problems and issues and circumstances that aren't determined by their own actions.”
“I'm always interested in a new way that a woman navigates towards a better future for herself, a more optimistic future for herself, or figures out a way through a very human experience and manages to find herself,” she added.
Broken Country will also be available in an audio version through Apple Books, the official home for Reese’s Book Club audiobooks. Witherspoon noted how listening to a story can be just as powerful as reading it on the page, and can even help readers connect to it in a more intimate way.
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“There's really a different kind of connection with audiences through audiobooks,” Witherspoon said. “I think there's a feeling of being told a story, like a raconteur, that is an age-old, historical, human experience. I think people connect in different ways when they listen to audio, like you're being told the most amazing story.”
Clare Leslie Hall (left) and Reese Witherspoon at the Reese's Book Club x Apple Books event on March 4 in New York
Clare Leslie Hall (left) and Reese Witherspoon at the Reese's Book Club x Apple Books event on March 4 in New York.
Marion Curtis/StarPix
Broken Country’s audiobook, narrated by Hattie Morahan, is itself an immersive experience, according to Hall.
“I know every single line of the book, but [Morahan] brings something new to it,” the author said of the audiobook version. And no matter what format they find it in, both Witherspoon and Hall hope Beth's story of resilience touches readers too.
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“I have feelings about this book that I haven't had for a few years,” Witherspoon said. “It just has a very special feeling of a singular reading experience that I think people are going to really love and enjoy.”
“I really hope that they connect with Beth's journey because she goes through so much in the novel and has a lot thrown at her,” Hall said. “But I hope that they'll come away being happy and satisfied with her outcome.”
Broken Country is now available from Simon & Schuster, wherever books are sold.
Hall, Clare Leslie BROKEN COUNTRY Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $28.99 3, 4 ISBN: 9781668078181
Unchecked passion gives rise to tragedy in a small English farming community in the late 1960s.
In 1968, bookish Beth Johnson adores being a farmer's wife. Though she is not a poet, as she once dreamed, her life laboring in commune with nature is one "where every single day is a different kind of education." She feels satisfied, especially as she gets to share her moments of rest with her husband, Frank, a reliable and compassionate man, and their close-knit network of family and friends. And yet, there is a seeping wound in their busy life: the loss of their 9-year-old son, Bobby, who died in an accident two years before. When Beth's first love, Gabriel, unexpectedly moves back to town with his son, Leo, a boy just a bit older than Bobby who is desperately seeking a mother figure, Beth and the reader are blown back to "before": 1955, before Beth knew what it was to love or to grieve. In addition, Hall intersperses scenes set at a 1969 murder trial so that, though she intentionally obscures the identities of the victim and the suspect until the climax, death crouches over the entire novel. As we watch Beth and Gabriel fall toward one another in two timelines, we are painfully aware that heartbreak is imminent in each. One would think it would be hard to shake this feeling of doom, especially since Hall also makes it clear that Beth will break her commitment to Frank early on, but her prose is so transportive that it's impossible not to hang on and hold out hope for Beth, Frank, Gabriel, and the people they love. There are several standout scenes, but an especially stunning one comes when Frank's brother, Jimmy, helps Beth deliver Bobby on the kitchen floor during a violent storm. Indeed, every scene that includes Bobby is touching, especially those that highlight his connection with the land--the characteristic Beth most prizes in Frank and is proud to have found within herself. Crystallized in Beth's memory as a "boy reaching back to his ancestors through these lumpy green fields, to the sounds and sights, the taste, the touch of a thousand years," he is without time, like love and loss.
An elegantly written historical novel with a compelling love triangle and a couple of clever twists.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Hall, Clare Leslie: BROKEN COUNTRY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827101171/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c4a70759. Accessed 30 July 2025.
Broken Country
Clare Leslie Hall. Simon & Schuster, $28.99 (320p)
ISBN 978-1-6680-7818-1
English writer Hall serves up twist after twist in her canny U.S. debut, a story of grief, love, and murder set in the Dorset countryside. The year is 1968 and Beth Johnson, wife of gentle sheep farmer Frank, remains shattered by the death of her nine-year-old son, Bobby, in an accident two years earlier. Her first love, Gabriel, a bestselling novelist who grew up wealthy on a nearby estate, returns with his young son, Leo, after separating from his American wife. Beth reconnects with Gabriel, fantasizing about rewinding her life to a simpler time, and she forges a bond with Leo, who reminds her of Bobby. An unreliable narrator, Beth provides a blinkered view of the action, mentioning early on that a farmer has been murdered and someone close to her is on trial for the crime, but neglecting to reveal the identities of these two characters until more than halfway through the narrative. As a result, readers are kept guessing about the precise consequences of Gabriel's return and the circumstances behind Bobby's death. Hall makes Beth a fascinatingly complex lead who vacillates between restlessness and contentment, and the other characters' motivations prove to be different than they seem at first glance. This sharp morality tale will stay with readers. Agent: Wendy Strothman, Aevitas Creative Management. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Broken Country." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 3, 20 Jan. 2025, p. 31. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300051/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a4d6dbad. Accessed 30 July 2025.