Loaded - Softcover

Christos Tsiolkas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0091831083 ISBN 13: 9780091831080

Publisher: Random House USA Inc, 1996

Synopsis

Families can detonate. Some families are torn apart forever by one small act, one solitary mistake. In my family it was a series of small explosions; consistent, passionate, pathetic. Cruel words, crude threats... We spurred each other on till we reached a crescendo of pain and we retired exhaused to our rooms, in tears or in fury. Ari is nineteen, unemployed and a poofter who doesn't want to be gay. He is looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. He doesn't believe in anyone or anything, except the power of music. All he wants to do is dance, take drugs, have sex and change the world. For Ari, all the orthodoxies of family, sex, politics and work have collapsed. Caught between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs, chemicals and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only ways he knows how. Written in stark, uncompromising prose, Loaded is a first novel of great passion and power.

About this title

About the Author:

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of six novels: Loaded (filmed as Head-On) The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award. The Slap won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize 2009 and was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the ALS Gold Medal. His most recent novel, Barracuda, was published in 2014, followed by a collection of stories, Merciless Gods, in 2015. and He is also a playwright, essayist and screen writer. He lives in Melbourne.

Review:

"An addictive read... Loaded is a must for your suitcase" Stylist "Loaded is a high-octane, drug- and sex-fuelled romp through 24 hours in the life of Ari, a 19-year-old Greek-Australian gay man living on the margins of society. ... there is such a remarkable energy about Ari's narrative in Loaded, and so much self-aware humour and pathos, that it is utterly absorbing, and reminiscent in that respect of such debut novels as Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero or Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. Loaded is a glorious, almighty "fuck you" to Australian society, a primal howl of angst and anguish." -- Doug Johnstone Independent on Sunday "Praise for The Slap: Nothing short of a tour de force. Tsiolkas outs a microscope to family life and presents us with a vision both of unflinching honesty and great tenderness. Here is a novel of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Don De Lillo's Underworld" -- Colm Toibin

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0091831083
• ISBN 13: 9780091831080
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 15