Simon McDonald

Review: Gravity Let Me Go by Trent Dalton (2025)

I want to like Trent Dalton’s books, because Trent Dalton is so damn likeable. There’s probably not a kinder, more sentimental, or as gregarious a soul on the planet. But his fiction has never clicked for me. Something about his prose, his particular storytelling peculiarities, its cadence and sentimentality—it just hasn’t worked. I took a…
Review: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (2025)

Confession time—this is my first Arundhati Roy. Shameful, really. A crime against literature. But it’s turned out okay actually, because I think this memoir is a great place to commence one’s journey into her oeuvre. It’s one of the finest books I’ve read this year. Certainly the best memoir. Mother Mary Comes to Me is…
Review: What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (2025)

This is an elegantly written, smartly-conceived post-apocalyptic novel masquerading as a literary mystery investigated by humanities professor Thomas Metcalfe 100 years in the future, that I wanted to love—and did in parts—but ultimately felt too emotionally detached from its characters, who sometimes felt like they were being orchestrated by the machinery of the plot rather…
Review: The Visitor by Rebecca Starford (2025)

After her memoir, Bad Behaviour, the last thing I expected next from Rebecca Starford was the wartime espionage novel The Imitator. And the last thing I predicted after that was her latest, The Visitor, a dread-laden gothic novel with (possible) supernatural trappings. I’m not complaining. In an industry that craves categorisation, it’s a rare and…
Review: The Hiding Place by Kate Mildenhall (2025)

This is a perfectly calibrated thriller about a group of friends who decide to buy an idyllic chunk of land in the bush, whose first weekend at the property turns into a nightmare when someone ends up dead—and a decision is made to tell nobody. Hence their camp is divided between those aware of this…
Review: The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown (2025)

It is no longer a case of diminishing returns when it comes to my enjoyment of Dan Brown’s thrillers—all joy has been diminished entirely. This is a thriller—but man, it’s a slog; a patchwork of subpar plotting and inept storytelling. It is lethally overwrought, and outstays its welcome by a couple hundred pages at least.…