The slap - Christos Tsiolkas

"The Slap" is nothing short of a tour de force. Tsiolkas puts 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 DeLillo’s Underworld. — Colm Tóibín

At a suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly three-year-old 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.

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 modern family, a deeply thought-provoking novel of boundaries and their limits.