The Slap (Paperback)

"This summer's must-read...brilliantly compelling and utterly fresh...Fiercely fantastic, you won't be able to put this down." -- Grazia

"Strikingly tender...it claws into you with its freshness and truth." -- Sydney Morning Herald

"With The Slap, Tsiolkas secures his place as one of our most important novelists...It is thrilling to have our life reflected back at us so accurately. By painting an Australia we can recognise in language as good you don't notice it, Tsiolkas has written an absolute ripper." -- The Age

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own.

This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event.

In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.

What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. In its clear-eyed and forensic dissection of the ever-growing middle class and its aspirations and fears, The Slap is also a poignant, provocative novel about the nature of loyalty and happiness, compromise and truth.