I really don’t understand how this could possibly be longlisted for ‘The Man Booker prize’, with so much praise from various other literary sources and reviewers to boot.   It is 483 pages long and not much seems to happen from start to finish.  It held my interest in so much that I thought there was going to be some twists and turns towards the end, there weren’t.

The characters are all fairly boring, it was like reading the plot for a Tuesday night re-run of Eastenders, but even that has some uplifting characters and random surprises.  The story starts with 2 young children having an argument at a BBQ, a father intervenes and slaps the other child, the police are called and a trial begins.  Every chapter from then on follows one of the characters involved leading up to the trial.

None of the characters are nice and it doesn’t seem that the author liked them either.  I have forgot who or what most of them did.  There is a teenage girl how has a gay friend, who everyone thinks are a couple, but in fact are both in love with the same Greek man, who happens to be the cousin of the man who slapped the child.  The man who slaps the child.  The grandfather of the Greek man and his cousin.  And the mother of the 3 year old victim of the slap.

‘The must read novel of the summer’ says The Guardian, I have no idea why.  It was like I got a slap for reading it!

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