Broken Country

Hall opens with a jolting line: «The farmer is dead, he is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.» In a brief prologue Beth must tell the police something — words she and the man she loves rehearsed again and again beforehand. The reader does not know what those words are, who has died or who is loved; the book keeps these questions open to the end. From the first page it announces itself as both a love story and a mystery.

The 1968 strand is set on Frank and his brother Jimmy's farm in the Dorset village of Hemston. Over breakfast Frank reports that Gabriel Wolfe has moved back to Meadowlands with two lorries of belongings from London, then takes Beth's face in his hands and says they won't let «that toff» bother them. Hall draws Frank with great delicacy: a tireless worker with no time for novels, yet always time to notice a skylark's sudden rise on a spring evening. It is a crucial choice that keeps the love triangle from sliding into cheap melodrama.

One of the strongest scenes is lambing season. A golden-furred gun dog attacks the flock and tears apart three lambs; Jimmy shoots it — and up the field runs a small boy in shorts, crying «My dog!» Gabriel appears behind him. Beth goes to the child no one is looking at, holds him and lets him cry. The line «And that is how it all began, again» closes the scene as a continuation of the first meeting in their youth.

The «Before» chapters return to a young Beth reading Austen and Brontë and dreaming of a declaration of love by a fountain with an orchestra playing. Gabriel is introduced as a «teenage Mr Darcy» in his father's old fishing trousers, scolding her for trespassing on «private property». Their dialogue — Emily Dickinson, P. G. Wodehouse, custard creams — is light, witty and endearing, and the author shows the class gap with subtlety.

The third strand — the 1969 Old Bailey trial — is the novel's engine of suspense. From the gallery Beth watches the man she loves sit in the dock between two guards and tries to read his fate in the faces of twelve jurors. The clerk's «You are charged with murder», and the irony of Beth, who had eagerly followed the Profumo affair, now finding herself inside such a drama, are rendered with cool precision. The author deftly conceals who is on trial.

Hall's prose is lyrical without being overwrought; the nature writing — the lily-covered lake, the willows, the fields of lambs — creates atmosphere. The Turkish translation is fluent, though our copy has scanning errors (words run together or split apart). The first 10% makes a strong promise: a heart-wrenching story of loss and a plot that invites the reader to solve the puzzle.

• Three timelines (1968, «Before», the 1969 trial) alternate and heighten one another
• The prologue shows the killing but hides the identities of victim and killer
• First-person narration opens Beth's inner world intimately
• Nature and village life are described lyrically and vividly