ACCOLADES AND AWARDS FOR CHRIS WOMERSLEY

Winner of Indie Award for Best Fiction

Winner of the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year

Winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Fiction

Winner of the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award

Shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal for Literature

Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year

Shortlisted for the Victorian Premiers’ Award for an Unpublished Manuscript

Shortlisted for the Gold Dagger Award for International Crime Fiction

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‘Bereft is a beautiful novel, which is a strange thing to say about a tale of so much loneliness, injustice and anguish. But somehow Chris Womersley peers deep into the suffering heart and sees beyond the pain that humans inflict on each other, to a place where dignity, loyalty and even affection might blossom. He writes with such compelling power it is barely possible to put the book down.’

DEBRA ADELAIDE

‘So stark and pitiless that it’s hard to keep reading. But it’s harder to stop.’

GIDEON HAIGH

‘I hammered through Bereft in a day; I didn’t want to be away from it.’

EVIE WYLD

‘Beautifully written and conceived, Bereft pushes at the borders of literary fiction and thriller, spinning a horrific incident in one man’s life into a page-turning reflection on grief and guilt, on the nature of storytelling and its inevitable joys and shortcomings, on what we have to believe in order to survive.’

THE AGE

‘Chris Womersley, in plain and startling yet tender and lyrical prose, has constructed a moving narrative that opens up the wounds of war, laying bare the events that pre-date the conflict and reach forward into the collective memory . . . War is the big drama of human horror, but the basest acts of cruelty are also enacted in what passes for peacetime. That Womersley can marry these two extremes, and construct a narrative in which the reader is left with a burning sense of regret and tenderness, is a mark of his skill and of his fictional reach.’

CARMEL BIRD, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

‘Womersley cleverly unspools his grim story, cranking up the tension with Dickensian flourishes and questions about war, existence, love and evil.’

AUSTRALIAN LITERARY REVIEW

‘This unabashedly gothic tale possesses such luminous beauty and emotional acuity that it has already evoked praise as lavish, if not more so, as that which greeted The Low Road . . . Bereft strikes nary a false note as it maps out the haunting, ambiguous territory between the trauma of war and grief, memory and longing, in a story of injustice and revenge that haunts long after reading.’

CANBERRA TIMES

‘The quiet whispering tone of this book will linger long after you’ve finished it.’

COURIER MAIL

‘Just once in a while a thriller comes along that is so good it takes your breath away. Australian journalist Womersley’s second novel does that in a heartbeat . . . It’s a thriller worthy of Hitchcock: taut, poignant and unexpected.’

DAILY MAIL

’A beautifully measured novel of murder and revenge, profound loss, and the possibility of faith and courage . . . Bereft is also a story about the power of faith, love and the imagination in an era when faith is breaking down, when “God is not watching us”.’

OVERLAND

‘From the hook of its first sentence, Bereft is a hard book to put down . . . Womersley combines really beautiful and eloquent writing with a compelling story, and Bereft has a literary sensibility flavoured with the drama of a mystery . . . Bereft is a haunting and beautiful novel that will surely deliver an excellent Australian writer to a much wider audience.’

LUCY CLARK, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘At times, Womersley’s prose is startlingly fresh, alive and direct . . . The Low Road achieves a smouldering tension and contains moments of rare depth and originality . . . this is a carefully constructed novel with considerable entertainment value for readers who appreciate bleak but intelligent and nuanced crime literature.’

ADELAIDE ADVERTISER

‘Utterly gripping.’

THE AGE

‘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.’

AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW