It was an ordinary picnic near an ordinary house in the suburbs of Melbourne, where completely ordinary people gathered. And nothing foreshadowed that what happened would happen very soon. One of the guests, enraged by the behavior of someone else’s three-year-old child, gives him a full-fledged slap in the face. And the reader will find an echo of this slap in the face in every line of the novel by the recognized star of modern Australian literature, Christos Tsiolkas. “The Slap” is a bright, exciting novel about love, about marriage, about parents and children, about feelings and passions, about what makes up a modern family . And also what roads we choose, what responsibility we bear, what kind of life we live, what kind of society we are building and what kind of future we are preparing for ourselves and our children. “The Slap” is a portrait of the modern middle class with all its features, aspirations and fears. This is a sharp, provocative work about the nature of such concepts as fidelity, happiness, truth, compromise, responsibility, choice, revelation, insight, conviction, guilt.