Line Breaks: A Writing Life tells the story of George Galt’s deeply religious childhood, the turmoil of his escape from the ultra-conservative values of his family, and his ultimate success in gaining a toehold in the realm of books and writing as poet, non-fiction writer, and editor.

A settler clan with nineteenth-century Canadian roots, the Galts had produced judges, businessmen, and a confederation-era cabinet minister. In Scotland, the family’s patriarch had been an improvident author of some distinction, the novelist John Galt, who settled briefly in Canada in the 1820s. George’s family established itself in Winnipeg and moved to Montreal when his father took up a job with the Sun Life Assurance Company, of which he was CEO when the company moved its head office out of Quebec in 1978.