Christos Tsiolkas @ EIBF

This year’s Book Festival begins with a slap. It's a full house in the Highland Park Spiegeltent to hear Christos Tsiolkas talk about his Booker-nominated novel. The story behind The Slap is told through the eyes of eight characters attending a Melbourne barbecue where one of them slaps a badly-behaved toddler. Tsiolkas stresses that his book isn’t about the rights and wrongs of hitting a child. Instead, it’s intended to challenge assumptions about a country we thought we knew. His sometimes-lacerating candour about uncomfortable issues like domestic abuse has attracted charges of misogyny. But in Edinburgh Tsiolkas adopted a reasonable defence: “Don’t confuse the author with the characters; I learned that when reading Enid Blyton.” He is unapologetic about his quest for authenticity. “I want books that make me scared, make me cry.” But that gritty realism, he claims, is coming not from Europe, but from the new world. Asked if this reflects an anxiety on our part for avoiding uncomfortable truths, Tsiolkas takes refuge in his roots: “It’s hard for a foreigner to answer that. Maybe you should put the question to European authors.” Maybe. And what better place to do so than an international book festival? [James Carson]