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Fiction
Project Hail Mary
6 reviews
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Narration ★5
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A dog runs into a field of newborn lambs. A farmer raises his gun. And in the space of that single gunshot, on a sheep farm in rural Dorset in 1968, three lives that had spent years carefully not touching are thrown back into each other with a force none of them survives intact. That is how Broken Country opens, and I want to tell you right away that if you let it, this book will take an afternoon of your life and quietly break your heart in the gentlest possible way.
Here is the situation Clare Leslie Hall drops us into. Beth is married to Frank, a kind, steady, genuinely good man, the kind of husband you keep waiting to discover a flaw in and never quite do. They farm. They have survived a loss no couple should have to, the death of a child, and their marriage runs on an unspoken agreement that the past will stay where they buried it. Then the dog the farmer shoots turns out to belong to Gabriel, the wealthy man newly returned to the estate up the road, and Gabriel is the boy Beth loved with her whole teenage self back in the 1950s, before he broke her heart and left. He has a young son now. The boy looks, unbearably, like the child Beth lost. You can feel the machinery of catastrophe start to turn on the very first page, because the book tells you, up front, that a man will end up dead and someone will stand trial for it. What it withholds, and what kept me listening far later than I meant to, is who, and how, and at what cost.
What surprised me is how old-fashioned this novel is, in the best sense. Hall writes the way you imagine the Brontës might have, if they had been allowed to be honest about desire, and she builds Beth into one of those narrators you trust completely and then slowly realize you should not, not because she lies to you, but because she cannot quite tell herself the truth. The two timelines, teenage love in the fifties and its deadly aftermath in the sixties, are braided so that each answers questions the other raised, and the English countryside becomes so present it functions as a character, all wet fields and stone walls and the particular claustrophobia of a village where everyone remembers everything.
It is being sold as a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and a love-triangle drama, and it is those things. But it is also a courtroom mystery, a study of grief, and a genuinely wise book about the impossible fact that a person can love two people at once and destroy them both by trying. Over a million copies have sold, and unlike some phenomena, this one has the substance to justify the number.
The audiobook is carried entirely by Hattie Morahan, a British stage and screen actor, and she is the right choice. Some listeners assumed a single narrator would flatten a story this emotionally layered; the opposite happens. Morahan gives Beth a quiet, contained voice, a woman who has learned to hold herself very still, and she lets the cracks show only where Hall wants them to. Her Frank is decency made audible; her Gabriel carries the dangerous warmth that explains everything Beth risks. The Dorset atmosphere lives in her cadence, and at just over nine hours, she never lets the tension go slack. It is the kind of narration that disappears, which is the highest thing I can say about it, because you stop hearing a performance and simply live inside the story.
A word of care before you begin: this is a book about the death of a child, and while it is handled with grace rather than sensation, that grief is the ground the whole novel is built on. If that is territory you need to protect yourself from, know it going in.
Well narrated? Morahan's restraint is exactly right, a performance that vanishes into the story. A heartbreaker with the pulse of a thriller and the soul of a classic. One of the finest literary listens of the year, and worth every tear it will cost you.
Where the Crawdads Sing, the obvious companion, atmospheric rural fiction with a death at its center and a woman at its heart, or The Nightingale for another sweeping, tear-earning historical listen.
Hattie Morahan, a British stage and screen actor, narrates the Simon & Schuster Audio edition solo, and her restrained, atmospheric performance is widely praised for suiting the novel's emotional depth.
Both, which is its trick. It is a love triangle and a grief story wrapped around a murder and a trial, the emotional pull of romance with the forward drive of a thriller. Readers who love one genre usually find themselves gripped by the other here.
Yes, the death of a child is central to the story and its emotional foundation, handled with care but present throughout. Sensitive listeners should be aware before starting.
About 9 hours 11 minutes, a compact, propulsive listen that most people finish in a couple of absorbed sittings.
You can hear Broken Country free with an Audible trial, new members get their first title included. (Affiliate link, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.)
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