The Broken Places

'Sunlit and dark, painful and joyous' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

In 1931, Gregory Hemingway's life begins in Kansas City, Missouri. The third and favourite child of an overbearing father, Greg is a paragon: a star athlete, a crack shot, bright and handsome and built like a pocket battleship.

In 2001, Gloria Hemingway's life ends in a Miami women's correctional institution. Complex and contradictory, radiant and resilient, it is a life that has flourished against the odds and been lived to the full.

Inspired by true events and spanning seventy years of the last century, this is the story of a miraculous existence, told with beauty and compassion. Transporting the reader back and forth in time, from Cuba to New York and Montana to Florida, The Broken Places explores what it means to grow up in the shadow of a man famous for his masculinity, to bear the weight of expectation and a tragic family legacy, and to finally step out into the light.

I was completely caught up by it and found it intensely moving. The composite method of shuttling between times and places allows a depth of character to build in a way that feels almost cubist. I admire the way in which each character is seen in their variousness and inconsistency so that there is compassion for all. The central character is imagined so fully that their fractured memories now feel like my own and I left the book sad to be leaving a person I had grown to care about greatly Elizabeth Cook
A humane and compassionate look at a fascinating life, the complexity of gender, and the destructive legacy of being the child of the world's most famous alpha male Patrick Ness
Sunlit and dark, painful and joyous, The Broken Places follows Ernest Hemingway's child on a lifelong journey. Russell Franklin has crafted a myth-busting novel of rare skill and integrity. Its echoes persist and evolve long after the final pages' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
'Franklin's prose is contained and concise... and provokes the question about the fixity of selfhood. What does it mean to be a man or a woman? And what about all the lives in between' The Telegraph
The Broken Place is an enrapturing story about family and expectation Independent

Russell Franklin was born in Solihull, and now lives and works in London. He was selected for the prestigious London Library Emerging Writers Programme 2020-2021. This is his first novel.

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