Broken Country (Reese's Book Club)
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4.4 • 4.2K Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“An unforgettable story of love, loss, and the choices that shape our lives” (Reese Witherspoon)—that sold over a million copies and is soon to be a major motion picture.
“This evocative, sensitive and compelling novel fires directly at the human heart and hits the mark.” —Delia Owens, New York Times bestselling author of Where the Crawdads Sing
“The farmer is dead. He is dead and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”
Beth and her gentle, kind husband, Frank, are happily married, though their relationship relies on the past staying buried.
But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. The dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son, Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died a few years earlier in a tragic accident.
As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and latent jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to choose between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.
A sweeping love story with the twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
An old-fashioned romantic drama and a courtroom thriller blended into one pageturner, Broken Country is a surprisingly powerful read. 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 reads of the year.
Customer Reviews
Great
Easy read
Loss of a child
Beth describes the many awkward moments of folks dealing with someone else’s loss. The power to change the world in a heartbeat. My son died 14 years ago and I am always hoping to get a little piece of him from someone who knew him. He was here, he had a life, and I am his mom.
Disappointed
I don’t think I’ve ever given such a low rating ever, but I really felt this was a very disappointing use of my time. I don’t get as much time as I’d like to read, and I just felt this book made no sense; with far-fetched, unbelievable plot lines that would never happen. But the second half of the book had such predictable storylines that I had to skip forward thru the monotony of it -Another thing I never do in a book, and I still didn’t miss anything. Really felt this was a waste of my time and money