New Release
Heartbreak Farm by Patrick Budden
A Story of Loss,
Resilience,
the Will to Rise Again
A powerful story of loss, courage, and the unbreakable human spirit.
The book is called “Heartbreak Farm” and is a bit of a tear jerker It is about a 17 year old lad who finds himself having to look after himself after his Mother dies and his Father turns to drink . After being evicted from his home , he finds himself living in a squat with druggies. Unable to find work, but determined to make more of himself he eventually manages to get work on a farm. He settles down, but when things start to go wrong he blames himself. It turns into an uphill battle, one he can’t win.
Heartbreak Farm
Four thirty in the morning. A cold yard. A faithful dog at your heel.
Joe has been doing this his whole life, up before the dark lifts, out to the chickens, the bullocks in the shed, the tractor running before most people have opened their eyes. Gwen has the Aga on and the eggs counted by the time he comes back in. They do not need much. They have each other, the farm, and Jess. That is enough.
Then a hungry boy turns up at the gate with nothing to his name and nowhere left to go.
Heartbreak Farm is Patrick Budden’s debut novel, set on a working farm in rural England. It begins with the quiet rhythm of a life built well, two people who found exactly what they wanted and had the sense to keep it, and it earns your trust in that life completely before it takes it apart. Dick arrives with a story that is hard to hear: a mother dead from cancer, a father in prison, weeks in a squat with people who did not know what day it was. Gwen believes him before Joe does. Jess believes him before either of them.
What follows is a novel about what it means to belong somewhere. About the particular weight of being taken in by people who did not have to. About a farm that becomes a home, and what happens to the people left standing when the ones who built it are gone.
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About the AuTHUR
He also understands grief. And the younger generation, he says, has a harder time than the youth of yesterday. Dick is proof of that.
Patrick Budden
Patrick Budden came to writing at seventy-eight, late by most measures and not at all by his own. He left school, spent his working life as an engineer, and stayed with the same company until ill health brought him to an early retirement. With more time on his hands and increasing disability limiting what he could do, he sat down at his laptop and wrote Heartbreak Farm.
He has been married for fifty-nine years. He has one son and two grandchildren. He knows what a life built steadily over decades looks like, the work of it, the loyalty of it, the way it shapes you so completely that you cannot imagine being shaped any other way.
That knowledge is in every page of Heartbreak Farm. The farm in this novel is not a backdrop. It is a world rendered from the inside, the tripe for the dog first thing, the bullocks frisky in the cold morning, the combine harvester coming once instead of twice because Joe worked out something nobody else had. Patrick Budden writes farm life the way someone writes something they understand: directly, specifically and without any need to dress it up.
The World of the Book
Joe and Gwen’s farm runs on a rhythm that has not changed in years. Up at half four. Chickens out, eggs collected, bullocks to the field. Breakfast when the morning’s work is done, two eggs on toast, tea strong enough to stand a spoon in if Joe made it, marginally more drinkable if Gwen did.
They keep bullocks, buy them young and fatten them fast. Joe’s method, harvesting the corn before it fully ripens so the hay still holds the kernels, baffled every other farmer in the area for years. The bullocks loved it. They fattened faster than anyone else’s and reached market first. The other farmers thought he was mad. He made more money than any of them.
They sell eggs from an honesty box at the gate. People leave the right money almost every time. Sometimes they leave more.
Patrick Budden builds this world in the novel’s early chapters with the patience of someone who knows it deserves the attention. The reader learns the farm the way Dick learns it, one task at a time, at Joe’s pace, with Jess running ahead to show what needs doing next. By the time anything goes wrong, the reader knows every corner of this place. That is not an accident. You cannot lose something you have not been made to love first.
Heartbreak Farm is Dick’s story as much as it is Joe and Gwen’s. It is the story of a boy who had every reason to stop and found, in the least likely place, a reason not to.
The Character at the Heart of It
He had been living in a squat for a week. The others there did not know what day it was. Dick did not take what they were taking, he could see what it was doing to them, and when he had seen enough, he left and walked the streets looking for work. Nobody wanted to know once they heard he had nowhere to live.
He found the farm and knocked. Gwen opened the door.
He told her his mother had died of cancer a year ago. That his father had not visited her once in the hospice, not once the whole time she was there, and then she died and he started drinking and eventually put a knife in a man in a pub. That Dick had not had a proper meal since the day she died. He told her all of this and she fed him before she asked anything else.
Joe was suspicious. He said the boy could stay, but there would be no pay, just bed and board until he proved himself. Jess made her own assessment immediately and it was favourable. Joe trusted Jess.
Dick proved himself inside a week. He was up before he was called. He learned everything Joe showed him the first time. He asked the right questions and did not ask too many of them. Within a month he was doing jobs Joe had not thought to show him yet because he had watched carefully enough to work them out himself.
The plaque on the wall of the farmhouse reads: Dick’s Place.
What the Novel Does to the Reader
You will spend the first half of Heartbreak Farm settling in. The farm is warm and the work is honest and the three of them find a way of being together that is not forced and does not need to be explained. Joe teaches and Dick learns and Gwen feeds them both. Jess runs ahead. The eggs are counted every morning.
You will not be braced for what happens to Joe. It comes the way these things come in real life, not announced, not dramatised, just present suddenly and then permanent.
You will not be braced for what Gwen does after. Patrick Budden writes it plainly, as he writes everything, the banned weedkiller on the top shelf, the decision made, the farm without either of them in it. She could not stay without him. That is all the novel says. It does not need to say more.
And you will not be braced for Dick. By the time he sits in the shed with the whisky and the jar from the top shelf, he has put everything in order. A new will. A funeral plan. Letters for the police, for the paramedics, for the undertaker, for Josh and Anne. A folder of everything Josh will need to run the farm, dates, phone numbers, planting schedules, the way Joe did the harvest. Everyone I get close to dies, his letter says, I didn’t want to get too close.
He was eighteen years old.
Who This Book Is For
If you read fiction for the feeling of being somewhere completely real, a place with its own smell and its own cold and its own dog that runs ahead without being told, Heartbreak Farm will put you on that farm and keep you there.
If you are drawn to stories about ordinary decency, people who take in a stranger not because it is easy but because Jess seemed settled and Gwen trusted her instincts, this novel is full of it.
If you want a book that does not manage your emotions for you, that does not tell you how to feel about what it shows you, that simply sets things in front of you and trusts you to understand their weight, Patrick Budden writes exactly that way.
And if you have ever lost someone who held everything together, and felt the particular disorientation of a world that keeps going when the person who made it make sense no longer does, this book will find you where you are.
Heartbreak Farm is a short novel. It does not waste a word. Some readers will finish it in an afternoon and sit with it for weeks. It is that kind of book, the kind you press into someone’s hands without much explanation, because any explanation would get in the way.
The Farm Is Still Running. Dick Made Sure of It.
Josh and Anne kept the farm for many years. They ran it the same way Joe and Gwen had. The ashes were scattered in the same spot. The eggs still go out to the honesty box by the gate.
Heartbreak Farm by Patrick Budden is available now, a debut novel from a 78-year-old engineer who sat down at his laptop and wrote something that will not leave you quickly.
Pick it up. Start at chapter one. Stay for all of it.
The Farm Is Still Running. Dick Made Sure of It.
If you read fiction for the feeling of being somewhere completely real, a place with its own smell and its own cold and its own dog that runs ahead without being told, Heartbreak Farm will put you on that farm and keep you there.
If you are drawn to stories about ordinary decency, people who take in a stranger not because it is easy but because Jess seemed settled and Gwen trusted her instincts, this novel is full of it.
If you want a book that does not manage your emotions for you, that does not tell you how to feel about what it shows you, that simply sets things in front of you and trusts you to understand their weight, Patrick Budden writes exactly that way.
And if you have ever lost someone who held everything together, and felt the particular disorientation of a world that keeps going when the person who made it make sense no longer does, this book will find you where you are.
Heartbreak Farm is a short novel. It does not waste a word. Some readers will finish it in an afternoon and sit with it for weeks. It is that kind of book, the kind you press into someone’s hands without much explanation, because any explanation would get in the way.
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quote by Patrick budden
“Don’t think I didn’t like you two as much as I did Joe and Gwen, but I didn’t want to get too close, because everyone I do get close to dies. I want you two to live a very long and happy life. Forgive me for putting you through all this, but I can’t stay any longer.
Good luck, God bless you both. All my love, Dick.
Please take care of Jess.”
