WINNER OF THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS' PRIZE 2009

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2010



'A tremendously vital book in every sense.' - Sunday Times





At a suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly boy.





The boy is not his son.





It is a single act of violence, but the slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen.





Christos Tsiolkas presents the impact of this apparently minor domestic incident through the eyes of eight of those who witness it. The result is an unflinching interrogation of the life of the modern family, a deeply thought-provoking novel about boundaries and their limits...



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.



The must-read novel of the summer.



Honestly, one of the three or four truly great novels of the new millennium.



Now and then a book comes along that defines a summer. This year that book is The Slap... The writing has shades of Martin Amis, Nick Hornby and Anne Tyler... The ideal summer read.



As addictive as the best soap opera.



A tremendously vital book in every sense.



Dazzling.



Tsiolkas is a true storyteller and a hundred sentences could be plucked from the text to demonstrate his genius for establishing place, mood and character in a handful of words



Brilliantly compelling and utterly fresh... Fiercely fantastic, you won't be able to put this down.



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.



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.