The south-west coast is the kind of place people escape to. Unless you have lived there all your life, in which case, you long to get away.
Rosie and Cray chuck in their city jobs to move to Margaret River while Liza, Ferg and Sam have been there forever, working their lives away on the family farm.
Under pressure from developers, the two families come together in the community’s efforts against unwanted change. But a natural disaster on the coastline they love opens deep wounds, and the true nature of community is revealed.
Reviews for The Break
Fitzpatrick’s love and knowledge of her home state is evident. Her prose is fluid and evocative […] the sea is almost another character in the novel. The Break will resonate with fans of Tim Winton, as Fitzpatrick writes about the natural environment with similar texture and intensity.
Books+Publishing
There is some startlingly good, original and moving writing about landscape and place in this novel. It’s a brave writer who takes on landscape writing, in an area so close to the region that Tim Winton has over decades made so unforgettably his own. But Fitzpatrick’s best writing about the place and its ecology is almost mystical, with an attention to detail at once lyrical and microscopic.
Canberra Times
Quiet, refined, and captivating, The Break explores the emotional fissures that open up inside and between people, and, ultimately, how those rifts are healed.
Australian Book Review
The novel explores the experience of settling in and adapting to a rural lifestyle in contrast with the feeling of being trapped into living a parent’s expectations rather than following one’s own. Conflicts and doubts are often unspoken, and the boy’s awareness of his parents’ crumbling marriage is touching to read. […] The fragility of the environment is mirrored in the fragility of the human relationships under scrutiny.
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
