Jesus man christos tsiolkas biography

From the international bestselling and Booker Prize nominated author of The Slap comes a blazingly brilliant new novel.

One of the earliest Christos Tsiolkas novels – a dark, violent, pornographic and vividly imagined portrayal of family life behind closed doors.

The Jesus Man tells the story of one family, trapped between conflicting identities – while the parents were born Greek and Italian, the three sons, Dom, Tommy and Louie, have grown up as Australians. Haunted by their history and increasing inability to relate to each other, Tommy inexorably descends into a cycle of violence, pornography and madness.

When he commits a terrible crime, his family must try to come to terms with the terrifying stranger he had become, and the hell that living had been for him. With page-turning, thrilling urgency, Tsiolkas’ uncompromising and darkly humorous examination of the soulless void that life can become, detached from reality by technology, is an extremely powerful and timely novel, reminding us once again of his talent and originality as a writer.

After reading The Slap last year, and having read Dead Europe a few years ago, I figured I’d splurge and buy Tsiolkas’ other two earlier novels. The Jesus Man is probably the least known of the bunch, with Loaded being famous for being turned into the film, Head On, which caused quite a stir when it came out. If you’ll excuse the pun.

The men of the Stephanos men all have their problems. Artie, the father, is half-Greek, half-Italian, and struggles everyday with the problems this can cause. Dom, the oldest, had a small problem in his teens. And Lou, the youngest, feels the gap of being young. It is the middle child, however, that has perhaps the most problems. For this is Australia in the early 90s, and Tommy has lost his job. As his life spirals out of control, will everyone survive?

I know everyone is still raving about The Slap, but you can clearly see where Tsiolkas has come from, and his earlier novel seems to be almost a warm-up to his later stuff. Structurally, The Jesus Man is quite similar to The Slap, in that Tsiolkas manages to create a story from several different points of view. Here, each of the four Stephanos men have a story to tell, and together they build up a history of the latter half of the 20th century in suburban, worki

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