Broken Country

Everyone in the village said nothing good would come of Gabriel's return. And as Beth looks at the man she loves on trial for murder, she can't help thinking they were right.

Beth was seventeen when she first met Gabriel. Over that heady, intense summer, he made her think and feel and see differently. She thought it was the start of her great love story. When Gabriel left to become the person his mother expected him to be, she was broken.

It was Frank who picked up the pieces and together they built a home very different from the one she'd imagined with Gabriel. Watching her husband and son, she remembered feeling so sure that, after everything, this was the life she was supposed to be leading.

But when Gabriel comes back, all Beth's certainty about who she is and what she wants crumbles. Even after ten years, their connection is instant. She knows it's wrong and she knows people could get hurt. But how can she resist a second chance at first love?

A love story with the pulse of a thriller, Broken Country is a heart-pounding novel of impossible choices and devastating consequences.

About the Author

After several years of living and working in London as a journalist and writing Pictures of Him and Days You Were Mine, Clare, her husband and three children moved to an old farmhouse in Dorset. The house, the ancient fields surrounding it and the farmers who have a deep connection to the land inspired the setting for Broken Country.

Broken Country will be published in thirty-one countries.

Stirring, poetic and mysterious, Broken Country reveals how tender and innocent love between a boy and a girl can alter the lives of families for generations. Even on a quaint and quiet sheep farm of rural England, misguided passion brings murder and criminal charges against the most innocent of players because human nature is far from tame. Yet, even as love destroys, it can return to heal on the same sacred meadow where it was first conceived.

Clare Leslie Hall's novel Broken Country will be published on March 4 by Simon & Schuster in the US and John Murray in the UK. It is also being translated into 29 languages worldwide and a film adaptation of the novel is in development with Sony 3000 and Hello Sunshine. Clare spent the first half of her career as a journalist on national newspapers before publishing two novels HIM and MINE under the name Clare Empson in the UK and Germany. The novels are being republished under the name Clare Leslie Hall as Pictures of Him and Days You Were Mine. Her favourite novels - The Great Gatsby, The Secret History, Moon Tiger and The Go-Between - set a blueprint for the kind of books Clare loves to read and now write. Her threee novels all combine passionate love stories with an element of mystery and suspense. Clare is married with three children and lives in Dorset in an old farmhouse surrounded by fields, which inspired the setting for Broken Country.