ISBN: 9781848873551

Synopsis Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009, this title is an international bestseller. At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own…The reverberations call into question the relationships between all those who witness it. 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 unflinching interrogation of our lives today; of the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century, a deeply thought-provoking novel about boundaries and their limits…

Bookclub Review 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 this one slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen.

What the group thought.

“Foul-mouthed rubbish”, “A state-of-the-nation novel that doesn’t succeed”, “Writing by numbers”. That said, the group found the development of the characters excellent, even if few of them are likeable. The impact of the inciting incident as seen from the point of view of individual characters is also a plus, but the story doesn’t reach any real conclusion. In the final analysis, not a great choice for this particular book club but a good travel read nonetheless.