Michael Burrows

Autore di Where the Line Breaks

2 opere 5 membri 1 recensione

Opere di Michael Burrows

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Where the Line Breaks (2021) 3 copie

A fresh start : becoming a Christian (2011) 2 copie

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ANN (1) AV2 (1)

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Where the Line Breaks di Michael Burrows

Shortlisted for the Fogarty Literary Award and picked up for publication by Fremantle Press, Where the Line Breaks is an utterly absorbing novel by debut author Michael Burrows.

(Supported by the Fogarty Foundation, the newly established Fogarty Literary Award is a biennial prize awarded to an unpublished manuscript by a Western Australian author aged between 18 and 35 for a work of fiction, narrative non-fiction or young adult fiction. The inaugural award in 2019 uncovered a number of engaging manuscripts and Fremantle Press offered publishing contracts to three additional authors: Michael Burrows for Where the Line Breaks, Emma Young for The Last Bookshop and Mel Hall for The Little Boat on Trusting Lane. The winner was The History of Mischief by Rebecca Higgie which is a YA novel.)

The design of the Where the Line Breaks is intriguing from the very start. It begins with two quotations, one from CJ Dennis (War aint no giddy garden feete) and the other from a poem called 'Out Back' by The Unknown Digger, (Hell, I've taken all the Turk can throw at me).

Then there's a short sequence, beginning Always the same dream. It recounts the horror of line after line of men stepping up and over the trench, men he joked and drank and swore and dreamed with.

And then, signalled by a change in page colour from off-white to grey, there's the cover page of a PhD dissertation. That's followed by the Abstract, setting out the PhD author's thesis, a Table of Contents, and an Introduction, with footnotes...

Ignore those footnotes at your peril. The bemused reader thinks she has stumbled into a PhD, until footnote 5, referencing a book called The Anzac Legend by Brian Bishop (which turns out not to exist) but continuing with...

In year three I dressed up as Alan Lewis for Book Week, arguing that there were enough books about him in the library to justify my choice. I wore my grandad's medals, and spent the day picking up litter on the playground and telling kids off for not wearing their hats, because 'it was the right thing to do.' (p.18)

The author is having a laugh, right? What's this childhood memory doing in a PhD thesis?

As in The Weaver Fish by fellow WA author Robert Edison, the footnotes are part of the narrative. There are in fact three narratives...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/05/19/where-the-line-breaks-by-michael-burrows/… (altro)

Segnalato

anzlitlovers | May 19, 2021 |

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