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...
Amazon

The book opens at a suburban barbecue, where one man slaps the child of another. From that single act unspools a series of consequences, large and small, as a court case is instigated, testing the loyalties of friends and family. An affair is ended; another one begins. A decision about a pregnancy is reached. With each chapter, Tsiolkas shifts his point of view to a different character — a Greek immigrant in his seventies, an abusive Flash Harry, an adolescent girl in the first flush of love, an Aboriginal convert to Islam — slicing up Australian society in a way few will have seen before. Fond, fractious, lit from within by flashes of casual lust and malice, it’s like Neighbours as Philip Roth might have written it.
The Sunday Times

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own.
This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event.
In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.
What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. In its clear-eyed and forensic dissection of the ever-growing middle class and its aspirations and fears, The Slap is also a poignant, provocative novel about the nature of loyalty and happiness, compromise and truth.
Goodreads.com

Brilliant, beautiful, shockingly lucid and real, this is a novel as big as life built from small, secret, closely observed beats of the human heart. A cool, calm, irresistible masterpiece.
Chris Cleave

Nothing short of a tour de force. Tsiolkas outs a microscope to family life and presents us with a vision both of unflinching honesty and great tenderness. Here is a novel of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Don De Lillo's Underworld.
Colm Toibin

Once in a while a novel comes along that reminds me why I love to read: The Slap is such a book... Honestly, one of the three or four truly great novels of the new millennium.
John Boyne

About the Author
Christos Tsiolkas is the author of four novels: Loaded (filmed as Head-On) The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award. The Slap won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 and was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the ALS Gold Medal. He is also a playwright, essayist and screen writer. He lives in Melbourne.

Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House
By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

Forget everything you think you know about the making of the most powerful man on the planet. President Barack Obama’s triumph was not inevitable: it was the end product of a brilliant, calculated, convention-defying political campaign. In a race that will be talked about for years to come, he faced down his rivals with ruthless focus and efficiency. Race of a Lifetime is the gripping inside story of those thrilling months: from the meteoric rise of Obama and the collapsing House of Clinton to the erratic John McCain and the bewildering Sarah Palin. Brimming with exclusive revelations, this compulsively readable book lays bare the characters of the candidates, warts and all; exposes the inner workings of their operations; and charts the true path to the White House. It’s a tour de force: the sometimes shocking, often funny, and ultimately definitive account of the campaign of a lifetime.
Amazon

It is almost 50 years since Theodore White published his ground-breaking volume, The Making of the President, and for nearly half a century his has remained the classic account of a presidential election. Now two very different and far less reverential US political reporters have challenged White’s supremacy as a campaign chronicler and have come up with a book that in its own way is every bit as good.
The Telegraph

For those who watched The West Wing or who followed the last US presidential election campaign, Race of a Lifetime is a great read. It is written by two experienced journalists who explain that the material was taken from more than 300 in-depth interviews with more than 200 people between July 2008 and September 2009. These discussions are combined with memos, documents and e-mails which provide the source for the authors. The thread of a live dialogue running through the book’s descriptive passages makes it feel more like a film script.
The Irish Times

The classic account of an epic presidential race… A book that reads like the fevered dream that everyone even remotely involved in the campaign insists it was - longer, more intense, more significant and peopled with vastly more fascinating candidates than any presidential race in living memory. Small wonder that HBO bought the film rights nine months before publication.
The Times

Race of a Lifetime is sleazy, personal, intrusive, shocking – and horribly compulsive. It is also thoroughly researched, well-paced and occasionally very amusing. Anyone who follows American politics will want to read it.
The Economist

Race of a Lifetime is, indeed, a fantastically detailed and gossipy affair – which is not to diminish its effect. The authors say they hope to occupy the ground that lies "between history and journalism"; their book, researched while events unfolded, written with hindsight and published as its eventual hero wipes the floor with his mandate, shows its very familiar lead characters in often surprising light.
The Guardian

A spicy smorgasbord of observations, revelations and allegations… The authors mix savvy political analysis with detailed reconstructions of scenes and conversations. They employ the same sort of technique Bob Woodward pioneered in his bestselling books to create a novelistic narrative. [Race of a Lifetime] leaves the reader with a vivid, visceral sense of the campaign and a keen understanding of the paradoxes and contingencies of history.
The New York Times

About the Author
John Heilemann and Mark Halperin are two of the most acclaimed political reporters in the United States, with unrivalled access to the presidential candidates and their teams throughout the campaign. John Heilemann is the national political correspondent and columnist for New York magazine. He is a National Magazine Award finalist, and a former staff writer for the New Yorker, the Economist, and Wired. Mark Halperin is editor-at-large and senior political analyst for Time, founding editor of The Page on time.com, and former political director of ABC News.