Broken Country is a beautiful novel that captivates from the first line: “The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”

Part literary thriller, part historical fiction, part sweeping love story, Broken Country is about the destructive force of grief, the suffocating class structure of 1960s rural England, and the gravitational pull of a powerful first love that echoes through time.

I adored every sentence, every character, every description of daily life in a Dorset village.

The novel opens with a murder trial. We don’t know the identity of the victim or the accused, but we know that Beth, a farmer’s wife, is the central character. As scenes move back and forth through the last decade of her life, we meet the key players in a heartbreaking tragedy filled with misunderstanding, dark secrets and ultimately, forgiveness.

At seventeen, harboring dreams of becoming a poet, Beth trespasses on private land and meets Gabriel Wolfe—son of the ‘lord of the manor’—who is pursuing his own dream of becoming a famous novelist. After an idyllic summer together, he heads to Oxford and encourages her to apply. But the abrupt end of their passion changes everything. Instead of leaving for university, she stays in the village and marries Frank—the kind young man who has loved her since childhood and wants only to take over the family farm. They’re happy for the next ten years, and Beth feels blessed. Until the accidental death of their child.

When Gabriel, now the darling of the literary world, returns to the ‘big’ house with his young son and no wife, the chemistry between Gabriel and Beth reignites. Escaping from her grief, she allows herself to get sucked into a love triangle that she knows is wrong and cannot last. Despite the duplicitous nature of her relationship with Gabriel, there are no bad guys here. As twists are revealed, I felt genuine pain for all the characters in this impossible situation.

I couldn’t imagine how the novel would end or how I wanted it to end. But wow … The author dug deep and struck gold. The last chapter had me crying happy tears because it was perfect. The perfect ending for a book I will not forget.