Book Club Meets: First loves and sliding doors, with Clare Leslie Hall

0:00Gabriel Wolfe is back living in Meadowlands, Frank says. Welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton. Divorced now? Just him and his boy rattling around in that huge place. Today, Broken Country by Claire Leslie Hall. He gets up from his side of the table and walks round to mine, takes my face in his hands, kisses me. We won't let that pillow cause us any grief. We'll have nothing to do with him. Who told you? It was the talk of the pub last night. It took two huge great lorries to bring all their stuff from London, apparently. Gabriel hated it here. Why would he come back? His name feels strange on my tongue, the first time I've spoken it aloud in years.

0:47There's no one else to look after the place. His father long gone, his mother the other side of the world, up to her neck in dingo shit with any luck. Frank always manages to make me laugh. What's there for him anyway? Frank says casually. But I see it, the unsaid thought that flits across his mind. Aside from you. He's bound to sell up and move to Las Vegas, or Monte Carlo, or wherever it is these... He grapples for the word, looks pleased with himself when he finds it. Celebrities hang out. Frank spends all the daylight hours, and a fair few at night time, out on the farm, caring for our animals and tending the land.

1:34He works harder than anyone I know, but always takes time to notice the beauty of a spring sunset, or the sudden dizzying sore of a skylark, his attunement to weather and wildlife set deep in his bones. one of many things I love about him. Frank doesn't have time to read novels or go to the theatre. He wouldn't know a dry martini if someone chucked one in his face. He's the very antithesis of Gabriel Wolfe, or at least the one we read about in the papers. OK, let me tell you a little bit about this book. Beth was 17 when she first met Gabriel, and over an intense summer, he made her think and feel differently.

2:17Understandably, she thought it was the start of her great love story, but then Gabriel left and it was Frank who picked up the pieces. So what's going to happen when Gabriel comes back? Everything Beth thinks she knows about who she is is about to crumble. Is this, I wonder, a possibility for a second chance at first love? There's a real heart-wrenching pull of these different men and these different lifestyles Beth could choose to lead in this story. and she could be happy in both lives. I think we can all imagine that really. Right, as ever, my favourite part of being in this Happy Place book club with you is hearing what you made of the book.

2:55What stood out for you and how it made you feel? Joanne left a comment on Instagram saying I couldn't put it down. The story is beautiful and sad and really draws you in. Loved it. And Emmy, oh my gosh, you say I've just finished it and I'm broken. I gave myself a headache from crying so much. And here's Nicola. Broken Country by Claire Leslie Hall is a grown-up love story with so many different layers to it. It is a wonderfully touching story of love and how we can love different people so, so differently. Every single emotion was felt whilst reading this book, ones that I didn't even know I had.

3:32It has everything that you have ever wanted from a book and I have to say I didn't take a breath whilst I was reading it. It had me in a chokehold and as soon as I'd finished reading it I wanted to start it again. If you're listening now and you've not read it just pick it up. It is amazing and it deserves all the hype that it's received. Oh I love that Nicola. This book made you feel every single emotion. Me too. That is so perfect. I'm so glad that you loved it and I love chatting to Claire especially about that real intoxication of first love and our shared love of Dorset. I love Dorset. She also told me Broken Country used to be a very different book and she almost abandoned it entirely.

4:14So you can find out why she chose to be patient and came back to the story. There are some good lessons in there about the value of pausing and not pushing your creativity if it's not coming to you. Hi, this is Nox from the Popcast with Nox and Jamie. And maybe like us at the Popcast, you also know people who have been smokers or vapors. And Zen is the one product it seems like everyone is talking about because there are many good reasons to make a change to Zen nicotine pouches. Reasons like Zen nicotine pouches are still America's number one choice for smoke-free, hands-free nicotine satisfaction.

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6:33right here we go this is the show

6:57hello Claire hi Fern it's very nice to see you so good to see you and congrats on this amazing book Broken Country, which is our Happy Place Book Club pick for March. We've all absolutely bloody loved reading it. What an absolute joy of a book it is. And it's set in Dorset, my favourite county where you live. Yay. I didn't know it was your favourite county. Yeah, it's absolutely beautiful here and it's sunny as well. So that helps. It's just the best. Dorset is such a funny one because people just drive through it to get to Devon and Cornwall, but it's the best. It's got the best beaches what's your favorite beach in dorset um i really like west bay near bridport it's gorgeous i love west bay yes it's just so beautiful we i always see of that as like the fashionable bit of dorset and then we're in the sort of farming country but it's really pretty as well oh it's just all gorgeous i love a bit of durdledore i love durdledore yeah i love studland so beautiful They are amazing beaches.

7:58Corf Castle, they're amazing beaches. Shell Bay, it's all so beautiful. And I mean, I'm going off on a Dorset tangent now, but if you love West Bay, there's a great cafe I'm sure you've been to in Bridport called Soul Shine. I love it there. Best coffee and the best cakes. The best cakes ever. And they do this sort of charred broccoli thing. Oh my God, I could eat there every day. It's incredible. It is too good. So it's a Dorset love affair. Obviously you live in Dorset. Was it just sort of a given that you would write a book, this book, based in Dorset? I guess you kind of, you want to write a place, you know, intimately that you know the smells of, you can see the colours of.

8:34Did that just feel like the most natural thing to set the book there? I think it did. But I have written another book while I was here. And, you know, it wasn't inspired by the landscape. I think it's because the story came literally from this kind of thunderbolt moment when my husband was out running. We live in a farmhouse surrounded by a farmland and my husband was out running with our youngest son's puppy and it was lambing season and the farmer threatened to shoot him. So it was this kind of, it didn't happen, thank goodness. Moment of horror. Oh my God. And suddenly, weirdly, for a moment of horror, I saw this love triangle.

9:13I could sort of sense this big push and pull that there was the farmer and his wife and there was a boy running towards them. and behind the boy was the woman's first love and so that popped into my head and so it really was a farming story and I needed to kind of get to know the landscape around me even though I'd sort of lived here for well now 17 years you know I watched the dog every day in these incredible fields so I know it very very well but it was actually the act of going out with the farmers and finding out what it meant to be a farmer that really brought the setting alive to me. And now when I think of every single scene in the book, I can see it like a film because it's my landscape where I live.

9:58I am so obsessed by these Thunderbolt moments. And, you know, you hear it with writers, with songwriters. I spent a large portion of my career interviewing musicians who had this exact thing where, you know, it could be you're lying in bed or it could be you're doing something quite mundane or maybe something visual really inspires this moment where an idea is almost fully formed or certainly feels more formed than it should be for the small amount of time it took to arrive in your head what was that like having that that moment that idea come to you I mean it was incredible and I can tell you that I'm walking the field looking for a new thunderbolt and it isn't coming it was a real one-off um I think it was part this thing I was in the middle of book two and it was really I was struggling and you know the shiny new idea thing and John came back and had from this moment of horror and like ping this idea just arrived literally within 10 minutes of talking about it I was like oh my god I've got this amazing love triangle I've got to write it but of course inevitably the writing of it was not as easy as I thought it was going to be and it was four years you know I gave it up twice I kept going back because Frank Beth and Gabriel which is so in my heart.

11:11Yeah, so the Thunderbolt moment was amazing, but then it still took me four years and 20 drafts or whatever it is. It's such a fragile process, the whole thing, writing. You know, you can give up, you can walk away, and it's such a terrifying thought. I mean, I'm on my second fiction at the moment. I'm 48k in, and I've just pressed paused on that because I've had an idea for a non-fiction and I'm quite easily distracted and I feel quite urgent about it. So I've now started this non-fiction, but I am borderline terrified that I won't go back to this fiction. And I've got 48 ,000 words just sat there that I could just abandon.

11:52It's such a fragile, strange process. And you're the only person that can really motivate yourself to keep at it. I mean, with this anymore I mean it's gut-wrenching what did you feel like imagining that you might walk away from that story exactly that um I hope this might give you some hope for your 48 ,000 thing because um please tell me I was advised by a couple of publishing professionals to stop writing the book it wasn't landing and so I did but I was heartbroken and it was actually a girlfriend of mine we were driving back from Bath one night and she said I just don't know what you're playing at you love those characters why have you stopped writing it and it was her and I went the next day I went back to Broken Country and I never looked back but what I do think that massive gap well it wasn't massive but it might have been two months that massive gap made me see it enough with fresh eyes and it became the book it needed to be so for example Broken Country used to have the male voices as well it had Frank's voice and Gabriel's voice and also that gave me insight into who they were it was really it was a woman's story you know it's a story of a woman who's torn between two men and two lifestyles and also I realized it should be a period novel and I just think those things and I also decided to include a murder child all those things made Broken Country what it ended up being and I don't think it would have happened without the gap so I think actually as a writer the biggest challenge in a way is to stop sometimes and to take a break because when things aren't working my tendency is to just sort of bludgeon my way through and I think if I sit at my desk for 12 hours it'll work but it doesn't you have to actually have the courage to stop for a bit I think yeah and patience which none of us are good at I mean I'm so impatient if I've had the idea I want it written yesterday it's like it's not a quick process it's so bloody long and that you know thank god for your mate cheerleading you on because I mean, imagine if you hadn't finished this book.

14:01Not only is it given so many of us readers just such beautiful escapism, but also this book has blown up. I mean, everywhere. I mean, it's like, it's kicking off in the States. The noise around this book is wild. How are you processing all of that? Honestly, Fern, I mean, you are talking to a lifelong compulsive daydreamer and I never expected any of my daydreams to come in let alone most of them so it's been absolutely nuts and just so I mean just such a thrilling thrilling thing to have because the best thing the you know what it's like when you get rid of when you might say get rid of but when you finish finally hand over your last edit you kind of lose your characters and it's a bit like a mourning period isn't it yeah and what I love about all of this is just the readers and people get in touch with me and telling me what they think about the characters.

14:57Oh, you know, oh, it's been so wonderful. It's been such a big thrill, it really has. It's so amazing. I mean, just to pick up on what we were sort of talking about a minute ago as well, and you speaking through Beth and her experience of this, I thought it was so beautifully done because there's this love triangle, as you've mentioned for anyone that's not read the book yet, and you feel so much empathy and compassion for Beth, which, you know, when we talk about people, I don't know, say you've got her with Frank, her husband, and then she's obviously hugely distracted by Gabriel, her first love coming back into her life.

15:32It could be so easy to paint her as somebody that is easy to dislike and for us to sit there as readers feeling judgmental. But you just don't. You completely understand how she's torn and the pull of both men and why she feels so strongly about both of them. Did you find that a tricky line to tread? Yeah, I did. I'm so glad that you felt like that because I think it would be very easy to dislike Beth because she's a woman who's torn between two men and she's married to a very good guy and she's very happily married. But she's wildly attracted to her first love. And, you know, for her to cross over the line and to have an affair with Gabriel is going to make her a very, very unlikable character.

16:17So I worked very hard on kind of trying to make the way that the reveals came. I hope that the reader will understand. No one's excusing her behaviour, but I hope it's understandable because of what happens to her. because Beth and Gabriel both want the same thing at the beginning of the novel. They both want to go to Oxford University. They're both very clever and they both love writing. But her life gets knocked off course very easily because she's a sort of working class girl of the 1950s, a country girl. Whereas his, you know, he's born into great wealth and entitlement. It just goes exactly to plan.

16:53But Beth, I love Beth because I think she does make some, she's very flawed. She makes some big mistakes. but she's a survivor and what I really like about her is her life her university aspirations get knocked off course but instead she marries a farmer and she falls in love with the landscape and that life she carves out for herself is just as rewarding as the one she'd always dreamed of and so I hope that readers will sort of root for Beth because I think she follows the path that she ends up being much much more rewarding than the one she set out to follow. Yeah. And also it just shows how love and life is messy and complicated and nuanced.

17:37And I just thought you completely nailed that. And it was just lovely to be on that tumultuous journey with Beth and going through it all. You know, it was just it was exciting. It's exhausting at times. It's just it was so brilliant. and why did you why did you feel so strongly about introducing that notion of first love because it is obviously such a tantalizing moment in your life when you're a young person that you have that first huge love what what felt so compelling to you to include a first love in the story I think that I love to write about big powerful emotion and I think when I'm starting a novel there's got to be something in my heart that's pulling me into the story more than a plot it's got to be a feeling and with Beth it was this feeling of yearning and I think I kind of like the idea of creating these characters who had this big what if locked inside them it had gone wrong but they'd never got over each other and I wanted to put them on the crossroads and there's a second chance they could go back and I really wanted to look at can you go back you know is it possible to go back because haven't you changed so much in the intervening years as a person is it really possible and I do think that that first love is it's just so much bigger than anything else the first time you fall in love and that's what I really wanted to capture and I know my daughter won't mind me saying this because we've spoken about it but I remember you know obviously I've been in the same relationship 29 years so my first love is just a very distant memory but I remember seeing Maya who's 23 going through her the first big relationship and how enormous it seemed how all-consuming and then when they broke up how devastating and actually as her mother I think I felt just as devastated but it made it reminded me that it's the same the years past but first time love is different it's it's very special and unique and it and it feels much much bigger than any other sort of emotion I think yeah it's so beautiful I just I mean I'm a big old romantic so I just loved that whole storyline I was just sucked in and just like flicking the pages as quickly as possible just lapping it all up and absolutely loving it it's so beautiful oh I love and then as you mentioned a moment ago there is the uh the court case towards the end of the book I don't want to do any spoilers for people that haven't read it but So what I found really interesting was hearing you speak recently about doing some research at the Old Bailey.

20:11You went down there, what, for a week? Oh, yes. It was incredible. So the book took four years and about two years in, I remember saying to my partner, if I could include a murder trial, I think it would take this book in a whole new direction. But I'd never written courtroom drama or even really read very much, apart from To Kill a Mockingbird, which I love. And so I went to the Old Bailey and honestly, it was fascinating. Have you ever been? No. you can sit you should go you can sit in the public gallery you can choose there are sort of like 10 trials going on and most of them are open and you just queue up you go in and um you can't take notes or anything and you look down on the court and it's just there's so much sort of pomp and sort of it's spectacle and you've got the judge and the barris is what i found so fascinating i went to watch this guy who it was a murder slash man sort of trial which is exactly what i had in the book and it was a young guy who basically got drunk and had thought mistakenly that a man walking towards him had stolen his friend's phone so he punched him and the and the guy died so it's like a horrible case and but what was incredible I was get so wound up by the case because I'd be you'd see the prosecution I think right this is just you know this guy's definitely guilty and then you'd hear the defense and you feel so utterly devastated for him so that made me think there's so much a powerful emotion in a trial and that's why I came home and wrote my own version of it and I think it was a really I'm really really glad I did I'm probably the proudest of that because it was the hardest for me to write but I think it really helped to ramp up the suspense oh yeah and I mean there's all sorts of twists and turns that again I don't want to give way at the end where I was genuinely shocked like what what's what's happening here it was just the perfect way to wrap everything up and just just fucking genius quite frankly where do you write Claire where's your spot do you have a certain place in your house that you like to sit down and get get those creative juices flowing I'm in it right now and it used to be it's a tiny little room that was big enough to hold a cot so my youngest was in here for a couple of years and yeah and it's my office and I've tried working everywhere I've tried cafes I shared an office with some writer friends which was fantastic because we just gossiped and laughed all day but I didn't get anything done no I'm here I'm just in here I can't write in cafes like I always admire when I see friends of mine who are like just writing my new book in this cute cafe I am so distracted by everything I have to sit in complete silence on my own no one else can be in the house I usually I like to get up really early and right before the kids wake up that seems to really suit me when I'm not overthinking I'm just kind of in that nice state of am I awake am I not everything's a bit more fluid but yeah to write in a cafe I just I couldn't do it there's no way yeah I agree the early morning I mean I'm not waking up early enough at the moment which is a good thing but the early morning writing session is the best and there's something so romantic and so insular in the right way about you've got a cup of tea and it's just you and the house is asleep I love that feeling just me and the cats they're usually trying to walk over my laptop and sort of annoying me I mean this is definitely a book that I mean I'm sure it already has but is going to change your life so hugely that must just feel amazing because obviously writing a book and especially fiction it's such a strange process you know you're quite literally inventing a whole world and these characters from thin air like from absolutely nothing to become something that loads of other people not only believe in but feel deeply connected to in their own personal way there's such gorgeous alchemy with this process and for you to have done that to this degree where people are just losing their minds about this book and it's just traveling so far it must feel like your life's being turned upside down slightly yeah I mean obviously in the best possible way yeah but um you know obviously I'm thrilled um but it does a bit and it's you know what it's like when you're writing a novel you write in a vacuum don't you and you know you might you might show a friend or you might show your agent or your partner whatever but really it's just you and the story and the characters and it's hard it's so so hard to keep yourself going without having anybody else's input and you know this was four years so and it was just me and I knew that my agent loved it that was brilliant then I knew that the foreign rights agent loved it and that was brilliant but when we went out on submission I had absolutely no idea what other people would think and it was completely terrifying.

25:04And so just to have the validation, of course, but really the connection with the story and everything that people say to me about the characters, it's amazing. It really is amazing. So it's just been the biggest thrill. Who's your favourite character in the book? Is it too hard to choose? It's quite hard. I mean, I loved writing Beth and I care deeply about Beth, but I'm afraid I'm gonna have to say Frank because yeah Frank was the guy that when I was advised to give this book up a couple of times I couldn't because of him and Frank there's about I mean obviously no spoilers but I'd say there are three scenes if you saw the first draft and the 20th draft go wow different book contemporary very different but there are about three scenes I I think Frank's in all of them that always came across.

25:57And I needed to know Frank's ending. So I'm going to go with Frank. Yeah, Frank is for so many reasons, a very special man. And it's just amazing sort of when you're reading the book, all of those layers getting peeled back further and further to sort of really understand what kind of person he is and what motivates him is really wonderful. So I'm not surprised at all. I'm sure it was pretty fun writing characters like Gabriel's mum. It's always fun to write a mean character. So fun. Yeah, I absolutely loved writing her. I had to sort of, if anything, I had to pull her back a bit so that she wasn't too much of a sort of pantomime baddie.

26:38But she's a snob. But in my head, she needed to have motivation for behaving so appallingly. and so I knew a lot more of her backstory than I shared in the novel so the just she just about had motivation to behave as she does but yeah she is somebody pointed this out to me I'm not very good at realizing these things but someone said oh you chose her as your antagonist and I'm like oh oh yeah so I did anyway I guess she is the antagonist yeah and I think we've probably all encountered someone like that especially you know when you're young and and you don't feel like you've got perhaps the confidence to stand up to somebody who's you know extremely vocal about their opinions it's um it was brilliant sort of seeing how beth interacted with her and actually how much of the story ends up sort of being informed by her as well it was um yeah i liked her character a lot in this you know just it's just good to have a great baddie in there isn't it in the mix it's just so fun 100 yes absolutely so much fun um well i i'm so thrilled that we've all been able to read Broken Country for the Happy Place Book Club.

27:47It's just been so fun and everybody's just been loving reading it along with us and commenting on it and getting stuck into talking about the characters and the plot and the twists at the end. Thank you for writing a book that I just adored reading and not that you need any luck whatsoever, but all the love for whatever comes next with the unfurling of this amazing story. Oh, thank you so much. And thank you so much for choosing Broken Country to be the March pick. It's really meant the world to me. Oh, Claire, thank you so much. You utter legend. You utter genius. Thank you for being our Happy Place Book Club pick for March.

28:27Now, what are we reading together in April? I hear you cry. Well, it's called Bear and it's by Lorna Tucker. Have you started reading this one yet? It's a completely vital and agonising true story about Lorna's fight to survive living on the streets of London. She had to lie, steal, strip and just about everything in between. As I say, it's a painful read at times, but it's a really important portrait of female homelessness. So I really hope you'll be reading along with us. Let me know if you are on Instagram. We're at Happy Place Book Club. For now, a massive thanks to Claire, to the producer Anushka Tate at Happy Place Studios and to you.

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