The slap in the title of Roger McDonald's fifth novel is 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. Told over the span of a lifetime, The Slap reveals the redemptive power of friendship and love in a story that delivers its surprises to the very end. It is an original, disturbing novel that confirms Roger McDonald as one of Australia's foremost chroniclers of rural life and the complexities of the human heart.
(Source: back cover)
Writing Disability in Australia:
| Type of disability | Chronic pain, unspecified mental illness. |
| Type of character | Primary and secondary. |
| Point of view | Third person. |
