At a suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly 3-year-old boy. The boy is not his son. It is a single act of violence, but this one slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen. In his controversial, award-winning novel, Christos Tsiolkas presents an apparently harmless domestic incident as seen from eight very different perspectives. The result is an interrogation of our lives today; of the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century, a thought-provoking novel about boundaries and their limits.
Reviews
The Independent
Arifa Akbar
"Tsiolkas manages to add such winding complexities to each of these inner portraits – which might have spiralled out of control in the hands of a less deft writer - that the end result is dazzling... his remarkable narrative fluidity proves that a fabulous page-turner can also contain great emotional power and intelligence."
18/06/2010
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The Times
Joan Smith
"The changes in point of view from one chapter to the next create a novel of great emotional complexity; as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that Tsiolkas has a rare ability to inhabit his characters’ inner worlds. The Slap places family life under the microscope, and the outcome is nothing less than a modern masterpiece."
05/06/2010
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The Independent on Sunday
Doug Johnstone
"This ingenious and passionate book is a wonderful dissection of suburban Australian living… Perhaps inevitably, not all the narratives work quite as well – the two teenagers seem a little clichéd, while Rosie's story fails to explain her almost pathologically cloying attitude toward Hugo. But those minor quibbles aside, this is a beautifully structured and executed examination of the complexity of modern living; a compelling journey into the darkness of suburbia."
16/05/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Michael Arditti
"This is a rich and engrossing novel, full of vivid incidents and intricate patterns... It slightly loses steam after the assault case verdict, and there are overlong digressions when Aisha attends a veterinary conference in Bangkok, and she and Hector holiday in Bali. Nevertheless, Tsiolkas’s subtle character drawing, fast-moving narrative, and, above all, fierce moral commitment make The Slap a worthy winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize."
12/07/2010
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The Guardian
Jane Smiley
"Riveting from beginning to end… Tsiolkas uses his premise as a guy-line to stabilise his larger structure, but his real talent is for exploring the inner lives of his eight primary characters"
08/05/2010
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The Sunday Telegraph
Neel Mukherjee
"A book of such wide scope cannot be without its flaws: the prose can be clunky in places, the frequent sex scenes are uniformly awful, some characters are more interesting and convincing than others, while the soap structure somewhat traduces the novel’s ambitions. But these are only murmurs against a genuinely important, edgy, urgent book that hunts big game."
06/06/2010
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The Los Angeles Times
Oscar Villalon
"Entertaining… like a solid, tightly written TV series, it tells a layered, briskly paced story about complex people. Think Tom Wolfe meets Philip Roth. Or "The Sopranos" meets "The Real Housewives of Orange County.""
02/05/2010
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The Daily Mail
Stephanie Cross
"While his women are largely reasonable, and his men largely not, the concerns of each feel understood, and the voices of an angsty gay student and an ageing Greek grandfather are rendered especially vividly. Tsiolkas falls flat when he uses people to represent attitudes, but elsewhere this is a surprising, even affecting, novel, and as addictive as the best soap opera."
26/05/2010
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The Sunday Times
Stephen Amidon
"Powerful… Tsiolkas dissects his characters with a scalpel that is polished and sharp."
16/05/2010
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Times Literary Supplement
Ingrid Wassenaar
"Tsiolkas achieves an unusual double vision that both drives the story forward at speed and generates much of its pathos. Each person works and plays frenetically alongside many others, yet each is isolated and locked into his or her own point of view. Their characters are told even as they are telling themselves, and seen from the outside even as they are revealing their inner thoughts."
07/05/2010
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The Washington Post
Brigitte Weeks
"Domestic sniping and drunken quarrels are not the stuff of epics, but Tsiolkas makes his readers take notice and care. Redemption is always around the corner."
27/04/2010
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