Where the Line Breaks

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“Where the Line Breaks is a beautiful, ambitious novel, and while it takes a big risk stylistically, the disparate parts of the book are handled with great skill.
The result is an instant classic, and a perfect read for those interested in World War One.”

Emily Paul, The AU Review

Order your copy of Where The Line Breaks from the following links, wherever you are in the world, or visit your favourite independent bookstore and ask them to order it in for you. It’s also available from all the usual big online retailers.

“An ambitious and original novel – a literary puzzle, an engrossing war story and a captivating tale of love and obsession.”

Ryan O’Neill, author of Their Brilliant Careers and The Drover’s Wives: 101 Re-Tellings of a Classic Short Story

Where The Line Breaks was published in April 2021 by Fremantle Press in Australia and New Zealand, and is available from July in the rest of the world. My debut novel, Where The Line Breaks was one of three novels shortlisted for the $20,000 Fogarty Literary Award 2019, as well as being longlisted (as ‘Behind the Lines‘) for the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award 2018.

I wrote the first draft of Behind the Lines, as it was then called, as part of the Literary Novels MA at City University London, graduating in 2017 with a distinction. The first 5,000 words were published by City University in mid-November 2017 as part of the City Novels 2017 Anthology.

In 2018 the novel was long-listed for the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award. After almost a year of editing and rewriting, the manuscript was shortlisted for the inaugural Fogarty Literary Award. Incredibly, all three shortlisted novels were offered publication by Fremantle Press at the award ceremony. I’m super excited to be published by an independent publisher I have looked up to all my life and grew up reading.

From the Fremantle Press website:

Where The Line Breaks – Michael Burrows
A young Australian in London is writing his PhD on The Unknown Digger, an extraordinary poet of the First World War whose poems rival those of Brooke, Sassoon and Owen. In alternate chapters, Alan Lewis, war hero in the making, is experiencing life on the front, and a gradually disappearing vision of the life he has left behind. Meanwhile, in the footnotes, the scholar Matt is experiencing the challenges of academia and a new love affair.

This multilayered novel is rich in detail, and rich in irony as the scholar Matt compares his travails with those of the soldier Alan Lewis; and the war hero himself reveals for the reader the vast gulf between myth-making and actual lived experience in impossible circumstances.

https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/the-fogarty-literary-award/9629-judges-report-fogarty-literary-award-2019

If you’re interested, click on the pages below to follow my path to publication, read reviews, and see mentions of Where the Line Breaks in the press.