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