Andrew Block

The Truth Teller is a novel about a man hiding from himself. Told with pith and passion by Margaret Simons, it chronicles the career of journalist, Simon Spence. Spence lives in an exterior world. He hides behind facts and what he understands to be the truth. But Spence’s truth is a public one, not private. His private truth lurks far beneath the surface, suppressed by the very nature of the journalist’s ‘truth telling’ work. Simons writes about a world she knows, as a former journalist on The Australian. Her crisp writing style is ideal for the ambiguity of the subject. With razor-sharp words Simons sends messages that are as soft and blurred as clouds. She conveys the subterranean urges of the soul (‘the earthworm heart of a man’) as concisely as the fast-paced media world that buries it.