'The Slap' is a story starting with a life-giving blow delivered to a baby boy at the font of an Australian country church, over fifty years ago.
Tanner Hatton Finch is granted life that day. But there seems perilously little promise in it. He grows up wild in isolated, windswept countryside, the child of misplaced artistic parents. Obsessed with fire and explosives, he lies, cheats and steals his way through a childhood set on a course of opposition and destruction.
Only one person, Ruby, doesn't turn away from him. The story of their friendship forms the centrepiece of the novel until the dramatic appearance of Kel, a boy with a talent for loyalty and a love of knives, and Tanner's life changes absolutely.
