The Low Road - Softcover

"The Low Road is richly and powerfully written. It is also an almost unbearably intense, tragic, and unrelentingly dark story of addiction, regret, despair, and failed dreams that left this reader mightily impressed." (Australian Bookseller+Publisher)

"Womersley is a gifted writer with a curious and liberated command of the language ... The Low Road is an engrossing, confronting and excellent novel from a talented young Australian writer." (ABC First Tuesday Bookclub)

"As unflinching as Cormac McCarthy and as perverse as Ian McEwan, The Low Road blazes too with the lyricism of T.C. Boyle. It is a surprising and stunning debut." (The Australian Financial Review)

"It is difficult to believe that The Low Road is a first novel. It has the controlled pace of an experienced hand ... rife with images, it unfolds like a film ... Womersley’s language is polished and assured, each word precisely chosen, and every image finely constructed." (The Age)

"Womersley’s taut, almost monosyllabic prose creates a relentless momentum as it plunges into a black dreamscape with echoes of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Samuel Beckett, Horace McCoy, Georges Simenon and Philip K. Dick ... He does not set out to solve puzzles, provide answers or fasten the ends of riddles together, though his plotting is captivating. His is an almost poetic concern for the death of people, the way there is no redemption at their end, only the sensation of a world torn from its hinge, barrelling through space ... Maybe it is Cormac McCarthy of whom the reader is so naggingly reminded. It’s a big call, but Womersley’s mastery of rhythm and image is, like the crusty American’s, able to sustain complexity at the level of a sentence and a paragraph while holding the structures of his novel together ... This is writing you often stop to read aloud." (The Australian)

'If you are tiring of familiar fare, then this is something innovative and unusual ... a book that deserves the widest possible circulation' Good Book Guide. (Good Book Guide)

'Hard-bitten noir' Independent. (Independent)

'A prizewinning and stylish noir thriller, defined by its lyrical quality and its power to manipulate our empathy ... this is a sublime and perfectly constructed literary crime thriller' Raven Crime Reads. (Raven Crime Reads)

'His writing [is] alive and intelligent' The Bookbag. (Bookbag)