From the outset I knew this was a novel about love in all its forms. I started with a question: is it possible to love two people at once? With Beth and her teenage lover Gabriel, I wanted to capture the unforgettable passion of first love, a euphoria that is so visceral it can sometimes feel it has been hardwired into your veins. I also wanted to write about the more hard-won and enduring love that Beth shares with her husband, Frank. And I wanted to explore the love of a mother for her son.
The idea for Broken Country arrived in a thunderbolt of inspiration one fine Spring morning. We live in an old farmhouse surrounded by fields and my husband had been out running with our youngest son’s puppy. It was lambing season and when the dog strayed into a field of newborn lambs, the farmer threatened to shoot him. Luckily, that didn’t happen (Magnus is now seven, with a dignified sprinkling of gray in his muzzle) but a vivid scene came into my head. I could picture a young farmer and his wife surrounded by sheep and a distraught young boy chasing after his lost dog. I knew the boy reminded the couple of the child they had recently lost, and I could also sense a strong physical attraction between the farmer’s wife and the boy’s father. A readymade love triangle just waiting to be written!
What I didn’t realise was that Broken Country would also become a love letter to landscape, and that Beth’s journey, learning to immerse herself in the natural world, is one I would follow myself.
I knew there would be a farming family at the heart of the novel, and so I asked some local farmers if I could spend time with them, going about their day-to-day business. I learned how to milk cows (much harder than the farmer made it look!), I helped birth a lamb, I went combine harvesting. I stayed with a couple on a smallholding in Kent and saw firsthand how deeply they cared for their land and its wildlife. It was such a privilege to have this time, and it opened my eyes to the beauty of pastoral life.
Farming was once a revered profession, but it has fallen out of favour. The hours are long, the pay is bad, the holidays non-existent. Yet none of the farmers I met would conceive of doing anything else. This wasn’t a job – it was their identity and reason for being. I learned so much from them and it changed forever my daily walk around our fields. Now, I find myself looking and listening in a way I simply didn’t before.
In Broken Country, I wanted Beth to become a woman who is rooted in the land. A woman who can do everything the men can: birthing lambs, hefting haybales, bringing in the harvest. A mother who is taught to recognise every bird on the farm by her father-in-law and who teaches her son in turn, a thread of knowledge and belonging reaching back through the centuries like a trail of smoke.
I think of Beth when I walk past the oak tree or pause by the horse chestnut to listen to the circling rooks. Beth is part of me now and, strange as it may sound, I think she helped me connect with the landscape around me and appreciate the small moments of beauty I see every day.
