The novel was critically acclaimed both in Australia and internationally on its release, with Man Booker judge chair AC Grayling praising it as a "remarkable love story as well as a story about human suffering and comradeship".[8][9][2] It was shortlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Award.[1]
The Australian critic Daniel Herborn praised the book, writing: "A story that is both harrowing and deeply humanist, The Narrow Road to the Deep North has been billed as Flanagan's most personal work, inspired by his father's stories of his POW experience. It is also perhaps his most ambitious, a deeply felt attempt to come to terms with the almost unimaginable horror of the Death Railway."[2] The Australian critic Roger Pulvers felt that the novel was well written, but misleading about the Burma Death Railroad, as he noted that 90% of the people who died as slave labor building the railroad in 1942–1943 were Asian while the novel gives the impression that it was primarily Australians who died constructing the Death Railroad.[5] Pulvers also felt that the novel's Australian characters were better drawn than the Japanese characters, noting what the novel presents as a peculiar "dichotomy" of the Japanese between a delicate, graceful and poetical sensibility vs. a tendency to engage in outrageously savage cruelty that is almost incomprehensible could be just as easily said of other peoples such as the Americans and the Germans as well.[5] The Australian novelist Thomas Keneally wrote the book was "..a grand examination of what it is to be a good man and a bad man in the one flesh and, above all, of how hard it is to live after survival".[4]{ The British television producer Francesca De Onis in a review stated that The Narrow Road to the Deep North was well written, but very similar to Flanagan's previous novels set in 19th century Tasmania, when it served as one of the harshest penal colonies in the British empire.[3] De Onis wrote that scenes with Dorrigo and Amy were "...gorgeous, as erotically charged as the prisoner of war scenes are brutal."[3]
Writing in Literary Review, A. S. H. Smyth praised Flanagan for his "poet's appreciation of unsentimental detail", which serves less to embellish memory than to clarify it, bestowing "the quiet blessing of veracity on episodes perhaps otherwise too outlandish or too harrowing to be thought real."[10]
