The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Penguin, 2010)
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, this novel presents a riveting premise: A man slaps a young boy who is not his own at a friend’s barbecue. The ensuing eight chapters are written from the points of view of eight characters who witness The Slap. The incident goes largely unresolved and serves instead to reveal the lives of the mean-spirited and self-righteous cast of characters who are motivated by drugs, sex and self-gratification in the Australian melting pot of Melbourne. Ultimately, truth doesn’t matter in this world, and the characters fail to evolve and are never redeemed (7.5/10).
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