The Broken Places

An eye-opening, compassionate and moving debut novel inspired by the life of Hemingway's favourite child, who has often been misrepresented and misunderstood

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'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.