Broken Country
Broken Country
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Clare Leslie Hall on Broken Country
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A dog, a farmer, and a scene that arrived wholeThe incident that started everything lasted only minutes and ended without harm. During lambing season on the farmland behind her Dorset home, a farmer threatened to shoot her son’s puppy when it strayed into a field of sheep. The dog was fine. But before Hall had finished talking through what had happened with her husband, an entire opening scene had assembled itself in her head.
A moment of horror was the initial spark for Broken Country. One day, during lambing season, a farmer threatened to shoot our son’s puppy. Luckily that didn’t happen but, within minutes of talking about it, a vivid scene came into my head. I could see a farmer and his wife in their field of sheep and a boy running towards them, looking for his dog.
That scene survived four years and roughly twenty drafts essentially unchanged. The boy running across the field, the couple watching him arrive: everything else in the novel grew from that image.
Once the scene existed, Hall had to decide whose perspective would carry it. Her first instinct was to give the men equal narrative space alongside Beth, the farmer’s wife at the heart of the story. That version never worked. Setting the novel in the present day, her original choice, didn’t work either. The solution to both problems turned out to be the same solution, and the class and gender stakes she needed could only land with full force in a specific historical moment.
I also really wanted to throw into high relief the stark difference between Beth’s life and Gabriel’s life. They’re both equally academic and have the same aspirations to go to Oxford University and become published writers, but Gabriel, a boy who’s born into great wealth and entitlement, can make mistakes and his life never gets knocked off course. Beth’s life gets knocked off course so easily.
She had spent fifteen to twenty years as a journalist on national newspapers before leaving London for rural Dorset, and her starting instinct as a writer was always to follow the emotion rather than the plot. Two period novels in particular, both about love across the class divide, gave her a framework for what a 1950s-and-60s setting could do that no contemporary setting would.
My starting point is always human emotion; that’s what I like to explore. It might be nostalgia, or grief or longing.
The Go-Between and Atonement were both in her mind as models: novels where the era does structural work, making certain destructions feel inevitable rather than merely unlucky.
How she wrote it
Twenty drafts, one murder trial, and a twist she almost skippedWriting a farming family from the outside meant Hall needed more than research at a desk. Between drafts, she spent close to a year going out with local farmers in Dorset, joining them for lambing and harvesting. She also stayed with a couple on a small holding in Kent who directly shaped Frank and Beth. The woman knew every plant and every bird on the property, and took Hall to a hide her husband had built to watch nesting kestrels. That detail went into the novel. The research also changed what Hall noticed on her own daily walks: she had been moving through the same Dorset countryside for years while listening to podcasts, not quite registering what was around her, and the farmers were the ones who broke that habit.
The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley and Atonement by Ian McEwan have both been big influences. I return to Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively for tone and dip into The Great Gatsby constantly. I don’t think there is a more perfect novel.
About two years in, Hall decided the novel needed a murder trial. She had no legal background. Her solution was to spend a week in the public gallery at the Old Bailey in London watching an actual murder trial, taking in the wigs and gowns and the barristers performing like actors. She came home and wrote her own version. A retired police detective turned crime novelist then reviewed her scenes. His advice freed her from a problem she had been unable to solve on her own.
I wanted something poetic. I wanted something that reflected the pastoral landscape. And I also thought that a marriage is a bit like its own country and it’s a broken marriage. And also, I felt that Broken Country reflected the divide in the village. So you’ve got the landowners and you’ve got the farmers and everybody else. [paraphrased from audio]
The title itself was a late arrival. The book had been called ‘Savages’ and then ‘This Savage Land’ before ‘Broken Country’ came to her. Her agent pushed her to keep it even when she worried it didn’t signal what was inside, and the explanation she eventually settled on covered both the marriage and the village’s class divide at once.
The novel stopped twice completely. Hall gave it up, started writing something else, and came back. Those stoppages turned out to be the most clarifying thing that happened to the structure: time away from the manuscript made visible what months of drafting had not. The single biggest structural revelation arrived not at her desk but on a dog walk, roughly three years in, when a twist she had dismissed at the very start as too difficult suddenly made complete sense of everything. Fitting it into an existing timeline took months of rebuilding.
Those breaks helped me understand it. It was only Beth’s story, not the men’s because the men had a voice. And I really sort of believed for me hundreds of rewrites is the way, unfortunately. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Her parents’ names on the coverHall published two earlier novels under a pen name, her married name Clare Empson. This book carries a different byline, one she constructed from her mother’s maiden name and her father’s surname. Both parents had died before the book came out.
Leslie was my mother’s maiden name, and Hall was my dad’s surname. So they’re kind of on the front of the book, I like to think.
She lost her mother to cancer while at university, and for two decades the grief sat unprocessed. When she eventually recognized it in the novel’s two male characters, Frank and Jimmy, both of whom bury rather than face their losses, the recognition surprised her. She had not gone looking for it.
I lost my mom when I was at university and it took me 20 years to actually sort of deal with it really... I can see myself in Frank and Jimmy, which is funny, but I knew how to write those characters.
On what the book is wrestling with
The menace inside nostalgiaThe question Hall kept returning to while writing was whether you can ever really go back. For Beth, the pull toward Gabriel, a childhood sweetheart from a wealthy family she knew before marriage and grief reshaped her, is not straightforwardly about desire. It carries the charge of wanting to recover a self that no longer exists. Hall wrote her way to a specific argument about what that kind of longing actually does to people.
There’s a tendency to think of nostalgia as harmless sentimentality for days gone by, but there can be something menacing and destructive about it too, particularly in times of personal turmoil.
Hall had assumed she would avoid writing about parental bereavement. She was aware of how painful it was as a subject, and thought she would instinctively steer around it. Beth, the novel’s sole narrator, arrived already carrying child loss at her center, and Hall found she had no way to separate the character from the grief. What Beth wants from Gabriel is entangled with what she lost when her son died, and the novel refuses to treat those two desires as distinct.
I like to think of Broken Country as a love letter to landscape as well being a novel about love.
The Dorset countryside in the novel is not backdrop. It is the register in which Beth’s internal life becomes visible: what she notices, what she names, what she walks past without seeing. Hall spent years on those same walks before the farmers she researched with taught her to stop and look.
What she wants us to sit with
Flawed, unresolved, and more truthful for itOn tour, readers came up to share their own experiences of child loss, which Hall found moving in ways she had not anticipated. Others were vocal in their anger at Beth’s choices. Hall seems genuinely unsurprised by both responses, and her reasoning for writing a character who makes decisions the reader may not forgive goes back to a straightforward conviction about what fiction is for.
Flawed characters always feel more truthful to me than perfect ones.
Hall describes the ending as genuinely hopeful, not technically hopeful. She also calls it bittersweet, given everything that precedes it. Her hope for the reader is not that they leave the book feeling resolved, but that they leave it paying closer attention: the same shift in perception that living among farmers produced for her. She spent years walking through Dorset countryside while listening to podcasts and not quite registering what was around her; the farmers she researched with would stop mid-task to point out a red kite or a newborn calf, and that habit of noticing beauty in the middle of toil became something she wanted to pass on.
I like to think of Broken Country as a love letter to landscape as well being a novel about love.