My gratitude also to my wonderful agent Jay Mandel for his encouragement and sound advice over the years of writing City of Crows. My thanks also to everyone at Pan Macmillan Australia for making me feel so welcome, particularly my excellent publisher Geordie Williamson and editor Mathilda Imlah – both of whom worked long and hard to make this book as good as possible.
And, of course, special thanks goes to Roslyn and Reuben for their love and support. Love you both.
About Chris Womersley
Chris Womersley’s debut novel, The Low Road, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. His second novel, Bereft, won the Indie Award for Best Fiction, the ABIA Award for Literary Fiction and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the Gold Dagger Award for International Crime Fiction, The Age Book of the Year and the ALS Gold Medal for Literature. Chris’s short fiction has appeared in Granta, The Best Australian Stories, Meanjin and Griffith Review and has won or been shortlisted for numerous prizes. He lives in Melbourne with his wife and son. Contact him at: chriswomersley.com
Also by Chris Womersley
The Low Road
Bereft
Cairo
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Shortlisted for the Victorian Premiers’ Award for an Unpublished Manuscript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
*
‘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
This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.
First published 2017 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Chris Womersley 2017
The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked should contact the publisher.
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
EPUB format: 9781760555566
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group
Tarot illustrations by Leo Nicholls
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