As you might expect from an Australian author, this book tells it to you straight to the extent that, as you might expect from the title, it hits you right in the face. The Slap explores modern behavioural correctness in a world, and a language, where morality seems to have been turned upside down. For all its directness, this is a 21st Century book that deserves the praise that has been heaped upon it. But you might want to read it yourself before you lend it to your Mum.
March 2011 Book of the Month.
Click here to see Christos Tsiolkas' new book, Barracuda, which is published in January 2014.
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009, this title 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. 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...
'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
'With The Slap, Tsiolkas secures his place as one of Australia's most important novelists.' The Age
Author
About Christos Tsiolkas
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 Writer’s 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.
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