'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.'

'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.'

'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.'

'The Low Road is a beautifully written page-turner that remains with the reader long after its conclusion.'

'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.'

'Despair and desperation abound in a mesmerising literary debut.'

'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.'

'On the cover of this book are the usual claims re brilliant first novel, gripping, hypnotic, thrilling, and so on. This time you can believe every word. In some ways it's a merciless read, taking you by the throat and not letting go for a minute .... Beyond all the enviable descriptions, the truly original images, the compelling pace of the sentences themselves, is the overall powerful ambivalence found in reading experiences like this, where your desire to learn about the sordid failings and shocking crimes of the characters is matched by your fear of learning something dark and disturbing about yourself.'