The Slap

To smack or not to smack is the question that reverberates through the interconnected lives dissected in Christos Tsiolkas' award-winning novel, now in paperback.

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.

Winner, Overall Best Book the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009. Winner, ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2009 and Overall Book of the Year 2009. Winner, ABA Book of the Year 2009. Winner, ALS Gold Medal 2009. Winner, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2009. Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Prize 2009. Shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award 2008.