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 present 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...

The story opens with an explosion of characters from an extended Greek-Australian family and it took me some time to work out who was what. Each chapter devoted to a different character highlights the fact that most of them have their own problems, alcoholism, intolerance, sexuality, but mostly drugs of one form or another. Not quite sure whether all of the different threads came together and what the final outcome was.

Update 2011-03-04: Just saw an interview with the author where he bemoans the fact that Australia has become less tolerant and more selfish over the past 20 years. Hence the hedonistic characters in the book then.

with all the other books on the overflowing bookshelf under the stairs!

Ik visited the OBCZ last Friday and this is one of the books I took with me.

After entering the hotel go to the left, in the corridor next to the lift there is a bookcase in which I have placed the book.