Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009, this book is an international bestseller. At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own…The reverberations call into question the relationships between all those who witness it. At a suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly 3-year-old boy. The boy is not his son. It is a single act of violence, but this one slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen. In his controversial, award-winning novel, Christos Tsiolkas presents an apparently harmless domestic incident as seen from eight very different perspectives. The result is an unflinching interrogation of our lives today; of the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century, a deeply thought-provoking novel about boundaries and their limits…
The Author
Christos Tsiolkas is the author of four novels: Loaded (filmed as Head-On) The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award. The Slap won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009 and was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the ALS Gold Medal. He is also a playwright, essayist and screen writer. He lives in Melbourne.
And some reviews…
‘Brilliant, beautiful, shockingly lucid and real, this is a novel as big as life built from small, secret, closely observed beats of the human heart. A cool, calm, irresistible masterpiece.’ Chris Cleave
‘Nothing short of a tour de force. Tsiolkas outs a microscope to family life and presents us with a vision both of unflinching honesty and great tenderness. Here is a novel of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Don De Lillo’s Underworld.’ Colm Toibin
`Once in a while a novel comes along that reminds me why I love to read: The Slap is such a book… Honestly, one of the three or four truly great novels of the new millennium.’ John Boyne
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