An old-fashioned romantic drama and a courtroom thriller blended into one, Broken Country is a surprisingly powerful listen. On a sheep farm in rural Dorset in the spring of 1968, a farmer shoots a dog that’s attacking his newborn lambs. In a moment, his actions change the lives of his brother, Frank; Frank’s wife, Beth; and the local squire Gabriel, a wealthy man newly returned to his family’s nearby estate—who, um, also happens to have been Beth’s first love back when they were teens in the mid-’50s. It’s a story that could have been told by one of the Brontës or Charles Dickens, and author Clare Leslie Hall does right by it, creating compellingly flawed, three-dimensional characters and placing them in an artfully rendered time and place. In fact, the setting is so distinct, it’s almost as if the English countryside becomes a character in itself. This is going to be one of the big book club titles of the year.

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