Compulsion

Compulsion is quick witted, giving readers a slice of Sydney that feels like New York. Parties, vices, old loves and obsessions follow narrator Lucy as she navigates life and her compulsions. It's so well-written and will appeal to fans of Sally Rooney and Helen Garner's Monkey Grip.

Ariel Books

Scott's characters are bursting with life. Her prose is electrifying and brimming with music, sex, drugs and turn of the millennium nostalgia.

Samuel Bernard, The Australian

If you like your books with lashings of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, all wrapped up in quick-witted prose, this is perfect for you.

Gabrielle Williams, Readings

Compulsion’s strengths as a novel lie in its languid prose, a richness of writing that paints an evocative picture of almost Romantic-style dreamers and poets whiling away their evenings in a haze of cigarette smoke, sparkling wine and a veritable pharmacy of illicit drugs. Author Kate Scott has drawn from her own experiences as a music journalist, and the insights into the at-times chaotic music industry of the early noughties that Compulsion explores are as fascinating as the industry can be destructive.

Georgia Brough, Bookseller + Publisher

Kate Scott's chewable, lickable, gulpable prose transports you to clubs and hotel rooms and pool-side parties throbbing with dark electro, on a restless, reckless quest for rapture and oblivion. It conjures the laser focus of obsessions that burn what they touch; the halcyon glitter of a moment perfectly arranged and just about to tilt. It will live inside you, pulsing like a bass line, long after it's devoured.

Rose Mulready

Compulsion takes the feelings you have in your twenties and amplifies them through 60-inch subwoofers so they reverberate back through your bones, your organs, your heart. It should be shelved in the self-help section of every bookshop and library, such is its life-giving properties; it has given me back my pulse. The pages came at me like waves; sentence upon sentence hitting me with deep oceanic impulses, crashing into the frothy happiness that comes from being in the hands of a truly gifted writer. I was pulled back to the winsome, troublesome, threesome, lonesome, awesome days of my twenties, when music and life were the same thing.

Lorelei Vashti

A deliciously hedonistic tale sculpted out of words and sentences so good that they, at times, demand to be read twice. An utterly compulsive read!

Amber Creswell Bell

Surrender control and give in to Compulsion, Kate Scott's stylised, sexy and stiletto-sharp debut. Scott's diamond-cut prose is at once visceral and ephemeral, groaning with decadent feasts, coastal vegetation and teeth-clashing makeouts; forever just out of your grasp like wisps of cigarette smoke and laser light above a humid sea of bodies grinding to the perfect keyboard solo. Strap in and let an unforgettable story of sex, drugs and electroclash rush past you like the wet neon blur beyond the windows of a speeding Trans Am. Scott manoeuvres around sinuous curves and hairpin bends of plot and character, gleefully chainsmoking out the window, a ballet flat pressed to the accelerator and ruling the stereo with an iron fist in a velvet glove.

Clare Fletcher, Author of Five Bush Weddings

A smart, swaggering love letter to smart, swaggering youth, told in a voice that's racing hot, icy cool and always on the verge of losing its composure.

Ronnie Scott

The book captures with effortless lyricism the heady sense of decadence and doom suffusing youth culture in the early 2000s – and will appeal especially to those who lived through it.

Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald

It wasn’t long before I was intoxicated with the poetic, nostalgic, pleasure-seeking world where (metaphoric) pianos are thrown off cliffs, cars gobble up yellow lines as they speed down highways, and there’s a sense of complete freedom and escape from the mundane, hopelessness of ordinary life. Compulsion may seem superficial and selfish in the face of all the disasters and serious issues of our world ... but beneath the surface lies a deep existential yearning for love, meaning and purpose. It’s a yearning that many of us have learned to ignore or suppress through a constant stream of modern day distractions – some more destructive or creative than others.

Mia Ferreira, ArtsHub

Looking for the perfect summer read? Kate Scott's debut novel Compulsion is one to check out. Set in the whirlwind of early 2000s music, art and fashion, Compulsion is a thought-provking read about obsession, identity, relationships and music.

2SER

The cleverness is what is compulsive. Five stars.

Penelope Debelle, Courier Mail