Pre-order Where The Line Breaks from the following links, wherever you are in the world, or from your favourite independent bookstore:
Australia & New Zealand:
Fremantle Press
Dymocks
Booktopia
Angus & Robertson
UK:
Blackwells
Book Depository
Fishpond
US:
Barnes & Noble
Bookshop.org (US only)
Walmart
Books-A-Million
“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 will be published in April 2021 by Fremantle Press in Australia and New Zealand. My debut novel, Where The Line Breaks was one of three novels shortlisted for the $20,000 Fogarty Literary Award 2019 and was longlisted (as ‘Behind the Lines‘) for the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award 2018.

I wrote the first draft of Where The Line Breaks 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 In 2018 the novel was long-listed for the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award.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. 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.https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/the-fogarty-literary-award/9629-judges-report-fogarty-literary-award-2019
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.
If you want to know more, you can follow my path to publication by clicking the following links, updated regularly:
- Letters from the Writing Trenches: Gallipoli (published 1/3/2021)
- Where the Line Breaks Introduction Video (published 10/2/2021)
- The Path to Publication: The Digger (Apologies to Rupert Brooke) (published 15/1/2021)
- Where the Line Breaks Cover Reveal (published 18/11/2020)
For further information, send me an email through my contact page, or click here to head to the Fremantle Press bookstore.
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