The author of The Slap vividly explores his country’s social faultlinesChristos Tsiolkas’s characters live in a risky world. In his 2009 bestseller The Slap,a single gesture triggered the meltdown of an entire suburban universe, and in this new collection of two decades’ worth of short stories a wide variety of protagonists discover that their lives are just waiting to be ripped apart. It is as though the now familiar principle of the tipping point has been shifted from global warming to the interior workings of the heart; one word or look in the wrong place or time, and life becomes a catastrophe.
The title account sets the tone. A group of multicultural,metrosexual and conspicuously shiny young 1990s professionals choose to play a party game in which a word pulled from a hat initiates a sequence of personal confessions. Tensions escalate, the confessions become more alarming, and by the conclude of the evening the hosts,the guests, the narrator and indeed the reader bear all been not so much subjected to emotional scrutiny as disembowelled, or dismembered and scattered to the four winds.
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Source: theguardian.com