THE SLAP, BY CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS, ALLEN & UNWIN, $32.95.
Melbourne’s inner suburbs and family and friends gather for a barbecue. A child acts brattishly. One of the guests (not his parents) delivers the boy a stinging slap – and sets off a chain of events both extraordinary and familiar, which is the key to this book’s success.
It touches on the hot-button issues, not in a soap opera way, but with a sharp feel for the assumptions and follies that underpin our (supposedly) comfortable domestic lives. Parenting, schooling, ageing, marriage, sexuality, drugs, the lot. I know people who hate this book and say they recognise no one in these intriguing but often monstrous characters. I admire it hugely, congratulate the publishers on this re-issue and most especially Tsiolkas for turning his fierce, edgy intelligence to the way we are
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